Ask A High School Senior Anything!!!

Pre-College Topics High School Life
1

Hey everybody! I am a high school senior at the end of the college application process and I know that something like this would have been really helpful to me before the whole process began. This site has helped me so much over the past year, so I figured it was time to give back! So, ask away!

Just some things about me… I am an IB student, so I can answer any questions about IB exams, IB credit, etc. That being said, I have also taken TONS of AP classes, so I can help with that as well. I applied to 16 colleges in total and I was accepted into 9, waitlisted at 5, and rejected from 2. I have also applied for many scholarships (though fewer than the number of colleges I applied to), so I can try to help with questions about that as well.

Let me know what questions you have and I will try to answer them to the best of my ability!

MODERATOR’S NOTE: Anyone is free to ask or answer questions in this thread.

2

@panther2016 - Just want to say what a wonderful person you are with a great attitude! Congratulations on being accepted to 9 colleges. I’m sure you’ll choose one that you’ll love being at. Best wishes!

3

@TiggerDad Thank you so much!

4

@panther2016
First off, congrats!
Secondly, is it too intrusive of me to ask which colleges you got accepted to?
My other question is about essays? What made yours good? How can I improve mine?

5

I’m entering high school next year - how did you prepare for the college admissions process from freshman year? What was your course load and what extracurriculars did you do? Also, congrats on all the acceptances! 9 is an impressive number, what colleges were they?

6

Could you post you stats and what colleges you were accepted to? Also, what is your #1 tip for the class of 2017 in regards to college admissions/applying to college?

7

@ultraviolet56 Hi there! Moderator’s note says anyone can answer questions in this thread, so I thought I’d give it a shot. (I don’t mean to ‘hijack’ anyone’s thread. OP, let me know if answering my questions here bothers you and I will stop.) Another high school senior here. I applied to mostly elite school plus some matches and one safety, total accepted 16, rejected 7, waitlisted 1. Will be attending Columbia in the fall.

I wrote a snarky, semi-satirical ‘high school plan’ from freshman to senior year on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Should-I-be-planning-for-college-as-a-freshman-in-highschool/answer/Remi-Free?srid=p34Z

You shouldn’t be thinking about university admissions just yet in freshman year. Focus on keeping your grades up, sample extracurricular activities and pursue a few that you are passionate about, not those you think will look more impressive to colleges. Take the most rigorous curriculum that is offered to you (that you can handle) in the subjects that seem most interesting to you.

As you continue through high school, keep your grades up, pursue your selected extracurricular activities at an advanced level, and stay in a challenging curriculum. I think you should only start thinking about college the summer before your junior year, starting to prep for the SAT/ACT and narrowing down your college list.

My own course load was incredibly rigorous. I went to an Ontario high school that offered no ‘advanced’ APs/honors classes, so instead, my school let me design my own curriculum and I took several years of each subject at once. I took grade 8 & 9 math while I was in grade 8, grade 10 & 11 math in grade 9, etc. Same way with sciences. I had enough credits to graduate by the end of grade 11 (junior year), but since I am already younger than the rest of my class I decided to stay the last year and high school so I wouldn’t have a problem socially in college due to a large age gap. My senior year I took mostly intensive first-year classes at a nearby university.

In terms of extracurriculars, I was involved in singing, acting, and musical theatre for all 4 years of school. I am vocally trained in opera and musical theatre. I have been involved in tae kwon do for all 4 years and currently hold a first level black belt. My junior and senior years, I started volunteering at my synagogue teaching religious school to young kids, I also started working as a research assistant at a chemistry research lab at the university. I have also done interesting things during the summer: one year I took classes in Hebrew and Jewish History at a high school in Israel, and volunteered at an charity organizations packaging donated food items to be shipped to IDF soldiers stationed in Gaza (that was the summer a few years ago when the Israeli-Gazan conflict broke out: I witnessed most of that). This past summer I got a full scholarship to volunteer for a month in a hospital in Nepal after the earthquake last April.

Hope this helps at all. Please feel free to ask me any more questions or private message me.

8

@ZBlue17

My Stats:
ACT: 33C (35R, 35E, 30M, 33S)
SAT 2s: 770 Eng Lit, 800 French (w/o Listening)
UW GPA: 95.4/100, valedictorian
APs: self-studied French, 5
Intended major: Astrophysics
Race: biracial Caucasian + Native American
State: grew up in TX but moved to Toronto, Canada
Low income, not first gen

Courseload and ECs detailed on previous post.

Accepted (16): Columbia (Scholars), UPenn, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Berkeley, UVa, NYU, UCLA, UCSD, UCI, UCSB, UCD, UofT, McGill, Queen’s, UBC.

Rejected (7): Rice, USC, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell.

Waitlisted (1): Brown.

Please feel free to ask me any more questions.

9

@thetsaria Not at all! Go ahead haha the more, the merrier. :slight_smile:

10

@RoundGenius Thanks! And not at all! So I was accepted into UNC (my dream school and the one I will be attending in the fall on a full scholarship), Baylor, UVA, UF, FSU, UCF, UMiami, Emory, and Pitt. In terms of essays, make sure that your passion really shows. I had a couple ECs that I have been really involved in and that really truly shaped my career path, so a lot of my essays were about those and how they influenced my life. Also, have someone proofread your essays, but make sure that they still sound like you in the end. I had my parents proofread all of my essays, but for a lot of them, when I made the changes that they told me to make, my essays just didn’t sound like me anymore so I ended up not making those changes and I was accepted into many of those schools. The essays are the one subjective part of your application, so really make sure that the admissions committees will get to see how wonderful you are by the end of the essay.

11

@ultraviolet56 I really didn’t “prepare” for college admissions from freshman year, but I made sure that I was taking the most rigorous classes I could each year and that I was maintaining good grades in all of them. Freshman year, I took 1 AP and the rest were pre-IB (which is all we were allowed to take). Sophomore year, I took 4 APs, 1 IB, and 2 pre-IBs. Junior year, I took 3 APs and 4 IBs. And this year, I took 7 IBs, 2 APs (online), and 1 Dual Enrollment. However, whatever course load you pick, make sure that you will be able to maintain good grades (mainly As, but a couple Bs shouldn’t hurt too much). I had a couple friends who thought they could become valedictorian by taking 7 or 8 APs a year, but their GPAs tanked because they couldn’t keep up their grades. In terms of ECs, it’s better to have a few that you really love than have a ton that you are doing just for the sake of doing them. So, for instance, I’m just not an athletic person, so instead of trying to join a sports team and wasting my time on something I hate, I decided to focus on music and medicine-related ECs, which I love. But my one piece of advice for you, DON’T go through high school trying to rack up a resume you think colleges will like. Take rigorous courses, but don’t overload yourself. Do ECs, but only the ones that you truly love.

12

@ZBlue17 Here are my stats:

SAT I: 2260 superscore
SAT II: Math 2 (780), Biology E (730)
UW GPA: 3.98
W GPA: 4.72, salutatorian
APs: Euro Hist (5), Stat (5), Psych (5), Calc AB (5), US Gov (4), US Hist (4), Spanish Lang (self-studied, 4), English Lit (4), Calc BC (this year), Bio (this year)
IBs: Spanish B SL (7), Psych SL (5), Math SL (this year), Hist of Americas HL (this year), Bio HL (this year), English Lit HL (this year)
Major: Biology or Psychology
Race/gender: Asian/female
State: FL
Not first gen, middle class (no need-based aid)

13

@ZBlue17 My greatest advice is to make a schedule and stick to it for college applications. Class of 2017, at this point, you have basically done everything you can with regards to course load, ECs, and test scores (unless you are taking the SAT/ACT one more time), but none of that will matter if your application isn’t as great as you want it to be because you are rushing to finish minutes before the deadline passes. I always tried to stay ahead of the deadlines so that when one deadline passed, I had already submitted my application weeks before and was working on my apps for the next deadline.

Also, look into scholarships at schools. As I said in a previous reply to this post, I will be attending my dream school on a full scholarship. Well, it just so happens that I applied to that scholarship on a complete whim. I didn’t think I would get to interview for the scholarship, much less actually get it. But, you never know what can happen. So don’t shy away from opportunities because you don’t think you will succeed. Try anyways and, if it doesn’t work out, that’s ok.

14

Hello! Could you elaborate on some of the scholarships/scholarship programs you applied to?

15

@panther2016 A full ride to UNC? Wow, congrats! That’s really impressive.

16

MODERATOR’S NOTE:

OP has no say in the matter. :slight_smile:

Single-user “Ask Me Anything” threads are not allowed here because all too often, the OP disappears, leaving users in the lurch. That is why another mod posted the note in the original post. All are welcome to ask and answer.

17

@RoundGenius Get as many people to proofread your essays as you can, and ask if the essay reflects your personality and your voice. But please don’t let your parents / teachers impact the bulk of your essay! The actual writing should be your independent work. And please start way in advance, probably the summer before your senior year – the essay is the one part of your application you haven’t spent four years working on and improving. Don’t write it last minute and jeopardize all those years of work just because of a bad essay!

@ZBlue17 Sorry, I didn’t realize I completely missed the second part of your question. Right now, I would advise that you make sure you have all your ducks in order going into your senior year – you have your list of colleges to apply to, you’ve started your application and your essays, you have already asked your teachers for letters of rec. Know if you need to retake any standardized tests in the fall before you apply. If you are applying to elite schools, this is your last summer to do something ‘impressive’, like a job or internship, or heavy involvement for the summer in some extracurricular activity or volunteering.

18

@skieurope Thank you.

19

@panther2016 What online program did you take?

20

@college2021 So basically, for every school that I applied to, I looked into what merit scholarships are offered (I wasn’t getting need-based aid from a single school). This is really something that you would have to look into, based on what schools you are applying to. I’m just going to say this right now… most of the top tier schools (Ivies and such) don’t give out merit-based aid. But a lot of other schools do. Some schools offer scholarships where every single applicant to the school is screened for them and there is no separate application. Others have scholarships that you have to actually apply for. That’s the type of scholarship that I am getting from UNC. I applied for it, they had a series of interviews (semifinalist interviews, then finalist interviews) and then they chose who would actually get the scholarship. I can’t remember every school that I applied to that had scholarships, but I think I applied to scholarships at UNC, Vanderbilt, Pitt, WashU, and a few others. Also, some schools have scholarships that you have to be invited to apply to (like Pitt).

I also applied to a few private scholarships (not affiliated with a school) and I have gotten a little money from some of them, but most of those give only $500 or $1,000. Then again, once I heard back from the UNC scholarship, I stopped trying to find other scholarships, so I’m sure you could find some that give more money if you looked more. I only applied for maybe 3 private scholarships in total and they were all local ones (like by organizations in my county that offered money to students only from my county). That’s something that I think your guidance counselor or someone else at your school could help with. I think the College Board website also has a scholarship finder for more national private scholarships, if that’s something you are interested in.