@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.