College prep advice for 8th grader?

Parents Forum
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Any advice to a kid who is entering 8th grade? My son is an introvert, good in maths & science. He is doing accelerated Maths, Science honors, and English honors at present. He is also doing first year of foreign lang (Spanish). He does not have liking for medicine & business fields.

Originally I did not want him to push him to CS, but looks like he has aptitude for it, and he does not like anything else much. In the last 2 summer vacations, I enrolled him in 2 different Udemy courses for python, and he had the patience & discipline to go through the courses, and learnt it on his own.

The issue is he does not have much for extracurriculars, and I think that may hurt him during admissions esp if he wants CS in good Univ. I think he would have done well in SAT, but I don’t think SAT will be there anymore when he graduates HS in 2026.

He did swimming for a number of years, but it stopped for last 18 months because of the pandemic. He started going for taekwondo classes this summer. But I see these activities for his well being. I doubt if he can be successful at competitive level.

I am also wondering if I need to hire a professional counseling service for him
 the main reason is that we are in highly competitive school district in NorCal, and the counselors in school do not have much time for the kids. I am finding out that many kids have been attending clubs for Math Count exam, Science Olympiad, etc since 7th grade. But my son did not get into Math Count because the club’s entrance test was tough. We did not even try for Sci Oly because the curriculum looked too much demanding. So in general, there is world of confusion lies ahead of us :slight_smile:

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Let me put this gently: Don’t worry about it yet. Your son is only in 8th grade. He won’t be the same person in a year, much less in 4 years when the time comes to start on college applications. He may be interested in CS now, but he might find a new passion like journalism or international relations or whatever. Let him experience high school and find clubs and organizations that interest him (not necessarily you) and then you can help guide encourage him to pick up other things based off of those interests.

The bottom line is that an 8th grader’s passions and interests are still very much an open canvas. Don’t pressure him into going down certain paths or doing certain extracurriculars, because that only leads to resentment towards school, those activities, and you. Has he expressed a desire to go to an elite school? If so, all that you need to do now is encourage him to set goals for the grades and scores that are required to go to those levels of schools, but don’t be pushy.

In terms of classwork, encourage him to take the most difficult classes THAT HE CAN HANDLE, but don’t think it’s the end of the world to have one or two B’s or B+’s. Languages are great, I would advocate for him to take the same language all 4 years of high school (doesn’t have to be Spanish, Chinese is wonderful too).

In terms of athletics/physical activities, I would say that any sort of activity is wonderful. Make sure he enjoys it, but encourage him to stay with whatever he’s doing, because exercise is extremely beneficial in life, not just in college apps, and will help him out in other facets of life.

One thing you can get a start on now is volunteer work. Encourage him to find a service project or volunteer work to do. Not the kind of thing where you count your hours to list on an application, but the kind of volunteer work that you’re passionate about and can get more and more involved in as he goes through high school.

Bottom line:

Don’t pressure him too much now. Let him find his passions and his goals by himself, and then help him and support him in achieving those goals.

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Excellent post by @Adamlaw. I agree. It is very early to worry about college admissions and about competitive EC’s and so on. In many schools he won’t even have to declare a major until the end of sophomore year, and he doesn’t have to know his career path for several years, and that will change also.

Eighth grade is a time of great change for kids. Their brains are under reconstruction Make sure he eats, sleeps and sees friends. High school is a time for exploration. I understand he is in a competitive school but try to counteract the pressures there if you can.

There are many great schools out there- when it is time.

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Colleges will not care one bit about what your son does before high school. The fact that you are already trying to plan his major and worrying that he isn’t doing what other kids do is very concerning. Let him figure out what interests him! By all means, provide him with the money and transport for him to explore, but stop fretting about college.

These posts are so depressing. Read the linked thread here, maybe it will give you some peace of mind. Advice for incoming middle schooler, yes, middle schooler

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Relax and let your child be a child. I have gone through this process twice and have been active on College Confidential for five years and I can tell you that your child could do everything “right,” that is top grades, top test scores, a variety of extracurriculars, community service, strong essays, professional college counselor and STILL get shut out from the top schools. There are no guarantees.

Every year in April and May there are many high school students who post on CC that they worked so hard and they’re headed towards their state university along with many classmates who did not put in the same amount of effort.

I am not saying this to alarm you, just to make the point that grooming your child for a particular college outcome in the 8th grade can be a recipe for stress and unhappiness. I have no doubt that your child is smart and hardworking and will get into many colleges where he can thrive and succeed. And I’ll leave you with this post from an MIT admissions counselor which I hope will provide some perspective.

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Any advice to a kid who is entering 8th grade?

Have a great fun year!!!

Seriously
 :wink:

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I disagree with those saying not to worry about it yet. Yes, you should be thinking/planning for college applications now. The type of ECs that get a kid into the tippy-top schools don’t usually happen beginning in high school. The one that got my kid in, began in about 2nd grade. However, you also need to help your son to develop into a happy, fulfilled young man who will do fine no matter what college he winds up in.

If it is at all possible, your son should resume swimming, and continue with taekwondo, just because of the social interaction and self-esteem that comes with it. Another thing that he could try is cross-country running. All the smart nerdy kids do that in high school because you don’t have to have tremendous athletic talent for it, just grit, and the kids talk to each other while they run, form a supportive social group. If there are any clubs/activities/electives that he would like to try (cooking, shop, art, whatever), encourage him to try those things, too.

I would strongly encourage the interest in Comp Sci. He seems to like it, and does it on his own. He will have a fine career and a fine life if he gets a degree in Comp Sci, or better yet, Comp Sci and Math, or a double major in anything else he likes. That degree will be in demand for the foreseeable future, probably for the rest of his life. In fact, he’d probably do fine if he got that degree from any public 4 yr college, let alone UNC, for which he is in-state. I think that should be his goal, admission to UNC for Comp Sci and Math, unless some other interest comes up, about which he is more excited. It’s in-state tuition for him, it’s a great school, highly respected on a national level, and it seems that he certainly does have the potential to get in there. So if there is any type of Comp Sci enrichment activity you can have him do after school this year, and over summer vacation, I would encourage that, but ONLY if he likes doing it, and only for as long as he likes doing it. If he finds he loves it, you can have him exhaust the Comp Sci options at his high school early on, and then he can take evening Comp Sci classes at your local 4 yr state college or community college, one class a semester, all through high school, IF he continues to like it. In this way, he can be prepared `for advanced work in Comp Sci upon admission to UNC, possibly even get a master’s degree in Comp Sci along with another major, during his 4 yrs in college. But only if he likes it, and only for as long as he likes it. He may find some other interest in high school, and then your job is to help him to follow that interest, to the best possible outcome.

From what you describe, it sounds as if you are trying to mold him into a candidate for a tippy-top school. I don’t think that should be your course of action. First of all, because it’s unlikely to be successful (because of the bad odds), and secondly, because it won’t be fulfilling for him. I don’t think that a planned campaign to mold him into the preconceived notion of the perfect tippy-top school candidate by getting him into the “right” ECs now is going to yield the desired result. Plus, I think he’d be miserable. If he didn’t pass the test to get into the Math Olympiad cram school club, then that’s not where he belongs. I agree with you that Science Olympiad is not for him - because if it were, HE would be begging you to help get him into this, or he would have just gotten himself into it without you.

I always felt that my job as a parent was to offer my child all sorts of opportunities to explore what they might enjoy, might be good at. Swimming was intensive and mandatory until they were great swimmers, for obvious reasons. Dance classes, town sports, skating, singing and musical theater, musical instruments and lessons, etc. If they liked it, and wanted to take it to the next level, I arranged that too. My introverted child continued club swim team through high school, even though they were never going to make the high school team, because it was good for them, physically and socially. The others developed intense passionate interest in music, and for one it became the EC that carried them into a tippy-top school, even though it probably won’t become their profession. All along, my job as a parent was to make opportunities, and help them to advance in what they liked doing. Facilitating exploration of opportunities, driving, paying, etc.

No, you don’t need to pay a college coach, not now, and probably not ever. Don’t be pulled into the competition to get your child into a tippy-top school. Help him to find what he loves, help him to go as far as he can with it. For now, have the goal of admission to UNC, which you are so fortunate to have as an in-state flagship for him.

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Seriously? Maybe this holds true where you live, but this definitely is not the case everywhere. If the student is interested in XC, they should definitely do it. Same for swimming. I do not recommend this student do either one of these activities thinking it will help in college admissions, especially if they don’t like these activities.

NC State is commonly believed to be stronger in CS than UNC Chapel Hill.

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Please stop selectively misquoting me. Read the entire paragraph, and my meaning is clear.

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ummm
no, OP says NorCal

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Ohhhh, I misread. So he’s got lots of options in-state in California. Just not necessarily going to be UC Berkley.

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No where in the OP’s original posting did they mention tippy-top schools.

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@ albright7

if you read the link @Lindagaf mentioned,

I am in the same boat (seeing the college race kicking in in the middle school) except my child entering 6th and we are surrounded by families that have been prep-ing their children for elite college admission. We also recently found out kids taking SAT exam or having tutor for every subject (not because they need help but because they need to be ahead of everyone)

Best luck to your child and family. It is great that your child has found a passion early on.

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I disagree with this. I know MANY kids who attend/attended top colleges. I live in an affluent area outside a major metropolis and work with teens for a living, doing test prep and essay advising. With the exception of getting into advanced track courses for math and science, I do not know a single kid who planned in middle school what they would do in high school.

The students I know are not scrambling to be in the rat race in middle school. Furthermore, the students who do get into tippy top colleges, by and large, are motivated and tend to do the things they do because they want to do them. Yes, money helps. Kids in my area have money to finance their interests.

Some kids who are top of the pack (either academically or socially) in middle school will, unfortunately, be in for a rude awakening when they hit high school. I think most parents here on CC would agree that MANY kids completely change their friend groups, develop new interests, and grow into their personalities in high school. The subject they loved in 7th grade might be ditched entirely. The hobby they spent countless hours on might be forgotten.

I think it’s a disservice to our kids to expect them to continue with the same pursuits if they are no longer interested in them. Let the kid decide if he/she still wants to keep up that interest.

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There are two VERY different things here.

When most people talk about “college prep”, they don’t actually mean “college prep”, they mean “college admissions prep”.

Thinking about admissions prep for an 8th grader is a great way to make their high school years miserable.

If you want to make sure that your kid does not enjoy doing anything during their entire high school career, because they are always second guessing as to “will this help me get into a Good College?”, start college admissions prep at 8th grade, by all means.

If you want your kid to miss out on all of their opportunities to be a teen, to develop emotionally and mentally because they are obsessed about only doing stuff which will help them get into a Good College, start them at college admissions prep in 8th grade.

If you want your kid to internalize that learning and intellectual life is worthless on their own, and that the only important thing about any class is whether colleges like seeing it on the transcript, start it at 8th grade.

If you want your kid to learn that nothing s worthwhile doing for its own sake, and that the only reason to engage in any activity is for the reward of admission to an “elite” college, there is no better way to do this than to start early and begin hammering this into them from 8th grade.

If you want to make sure that they will be devastated when, almost invariably, they will not be accepted to HYSM, the earlier the better.

If you want to make sure that they have their first college related meltdown even before they start high school, you need to make sure to start college admissions prep before high school.

If you really feel as though you cannot live without the experience of your kid burning out by Junior year, you’d better get them on college admissions prep by 8th grade!

In fact, why start the joys of putting your kid under intense pressure to perform as late as 8th grade. Tiger parents have demonstrated that its never to early to destroy all joy that your kids will have in discovery and achievement.

On the other hand, starting a kid on exploring their interests and strengths, there is no need to wait until 8th grade.

You should be preparing your kid for life, and college is a tiny fraction of the rest of their lives. The most important thing that we should be teaching our kids about college is how to use their college years in the manner which helps them live their lives as best they can. We should not be preparing our children to be accepted to the most prestigious college that WE can imagine. We should be teaching our kids to choose the college which will best help them in the life trajectory.

Moreover, college admission prep at 8th grade is not only bad, it is not very useful. For example, my kid did nothing in 8th grade to help her get into college.

To be more correct - she did great things, including top awards in robotics, awards in math club, professional dance show, and others.

However, when she applied for college, she did not have either robotics or math club in her applications, and she was at a totally difference dance school, and participated in entirely different dance activities than she did in 8th grade.

Maybe had she started her college admission prep in 8th grade, she would have been accepted to HYP, and therefore would have therefore achieved lifelong success and happiness. I don’t know. As it is, she is merely at a very good LAC on a very prestigious scholarship, is doing very well, and is on track to her dream career. But maybe since she is not at an Ivy, she isn’t really happy.

As for her friend group - not a single one of them or their parents started college admission prep in 8th grade. However, most are still at excellent colleges or programs (like JHU, CS at UMich, UCLA, Pomona, Cornell, etc), or at excellent colleges with great merit aid. None is at a HYP, though, so they maybe all could only be under the illusion of happiness.

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Perhaps some posters are defining “college prep” differently based on some of the responses I am reading. :slight_smile: I don’t doubt that some families do enlist formal college advising in middle school, but I don’t know of any of my D’s friends that did that. I do know students who already showed a talent and interest in an EC (sports, music, theatre, etc) whose families actively worked with coaches and other advisers to plan out the next 5+ years to carry that activity into college. Some kids lost interest during that time or realized they would not be competitive at the college level. As long as the kid is driving the process, I don’t see any reason as a parent not to support it in any way that the family is able.

At my D’s school, students did need to make some curriculum decisions in middle school, particularly in math and language, if they hoped to reach certain advanced classes by 12th grade. This often required a summer course to move up a level. My D approached us about this because she heard other students talking about it. In our case, we did not take that course, as we did not think it was in the best interest of our D even though she would have been approved for it. She already showed signs of putting too much pressure on herself academically so we chose to encourage non-academic activities over summers so she could recharge.

We also used this time, along with her school, to work on soft skills that would be a foundation for a more successful high school experience and make it easier to meet her academic goals. By the time she started 9th grade, she had excellent time management and organization skills. She was also comfortable approaching teachers for help and understood the importance of taking advantage of office hours and extra study sessions. She could self-advocate and while we may offer her advice, we really stepped back to let her figure things out on her own (knowing we could and would step in if asked). We let her fail and fall on her face a few times and develop coping mechanisms (so hard to do as a parent).

ETA: Developing those soft skills is one of the smartest things we did as parents. We may have failed in other areas HAHA but we got that right. It made all the difference to her high school experience. And it was very obvious when we saw other extremely bright kids struggling who did not have those skills.

Every kid is different and as parents we need to evaluate what our kids need. There were a couple of crazy advanced kids in math classes with students 2-3 years older. I don’t fault those parents as those kids wanted that and needed the challenge. Is that considered “college prep”?

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The intense EC that got my kid into a tippy-top school began in 2nd grade, I think. He won an international level competition in it the summer before he began 9th grade, and another while in high school. Academically, he did his work and did well, read a lot, and played a lot until high school, when his increasing interest in his EC took up much more of his time. Always took the most rigorous courses, prepped himself for the ACT over the spring and summer before senior year. He found what he loved early on, and poured himself into it. He could not have made the decision in 10th grade that he wanted to have extremely high achievement in that field - it would not have been possible.

The point that I am trying to make is that if a student has the goal of getting into a T20 school, the very high achievement in an EC usually doesn’t begin in 10th or 11th, or even 9th grade. The kid who is going to win national level debate competitions probably was doing it through middle school. The kid who is going to win a major writing competition, or be published, probably started writing in late elementary school, or earlier. The kid who is going to be a recruited soccer player probably began playing by the time he was 6, certainly before middle school.

If the goal is admission to a good in-state public U, sure, grades and SATs and some nice school-level ECs are fine, for most states. But if the goal is admission to a tippy-top or T20 school (and that likely IS this parent’s goal - the parent is an immigrant from a UK-influenced country that calls Math “maths”, the parent is on college confidential about a 13 year old, the parent is guiding him and becoming aware of the competition surrounding him, meaning the kids who are already doing extra math and science prep for competitions). If the parent’s aspiration for the son is that he should attend the local branch of public state college, they would not be on here asking about whether they should consult a college admissions counselor at this early point!

So yes, anyone can do anything at any stage in life, even Grandma Moses. And middle schoolers, and high schoolers too, need space to develop into whom they want to become, academically, socially, etc. But it is also true that most unhooked successful applicants to highly competitive schools have a strongly developed special interest, in which they have shown high achievement, and that usually doesn’t start in the middle of high school - that usually starts a lot earlier. They’re right to guide the son to try things in which he might be happily successful, and they’re right to ask these questions at this point.

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LET HIM BE A KID! My other advice would be to make sure that he works on his “soft” skills. If he’s an introvert, you will have to make sure he has opportunities to learn how to interact with others. Learn small talk, learn to shake hands properly, look people in the eye and stand tall and confident.

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I mean it is pretty simple, was far as I can see it. There is a basic question:
Would you have your kid do this, would you support this, would you pay for this, regardless of whether it would “help” their college admissions? If the answer is “yes”, than it is not college admission prep.

Education is always good, and it is good for a kid to get the most advanced education that they can handle and which is available, whether in the classroom or beyond. This includes fine and performing arts, writing, or engineering.

On the other hand, my kid did not engage in the ECs which resulted in her getting a full tuition scholarship until her freshman year in high school, and she engaged in them solely because these were the most important social issues for her.

Furthermore, your kid, if I remember correctly, is a highly talented musician. Did you invest in their music lessons because “this will help them get into an ‘elite’ college”, or because “my kid is insanely talented in music, let us work on developing that talent, in the best ways possible”?

I would actually say that your kid’s case is a counter example to what you are claiming.

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I’m not “claiming” anything. I’m reporting that the extremely high EC achievement that aids in admission to the top schools often requires that the person starts young. Violinists beginning at age 7? Geriatric. Highly ranked figure skaters or gymnasts beginning at age 8? Nope. The instrument that my kid plays happens to be one where people can start it a bit later, age 9 or 10, and I’ve seen kids who didn’t get really serious about it until they were 14, who were still able to achieve with it. But when it comes to sports, or performance instrumental music, it’s almost unheard of to begin in 9th or 10th grade, and achieve at the high level needed to affect college admissions. On the other hand, if you find a certain niche opportunity, such as a survivor of a school shooting developing a passion for political activism to stop such horrors, yes, you CAN do that starting in high school. But it’s not as if parents provide such opportunities for kids (at least not usually!), and it’s not as if kids who want to be musicians or skaters can drive themselves to the rink or the teacher, or pay for the lessons, or the skates, or the instruments. That takes a parent to offer these opportunities to the young child. It sounds as if this is what this parent is doing, and I wholeheartedly applaud her effort to help her son find something that he is good at, that could help with college admissions and a possible future career.

And of course we cultivated our kid’s interest in music, at first because it was something that the kid could work hard at, at an age when school was not at all challenging, and because we felt it was a better use of time than endless video games. As soon as the kid was able to start playing in group ensembles, a year after kid began, it got fun. After that, it was just facilitating what the kid wanted, and by high school, most of the other ECs fell away, because there was just no time for them. But before then, we offered trying many things, and kid did many things, until kid’s interest laser-focused on music.

It’s so wonderful that your child was able to find a passion in 9th grade that got her a full tuition scholarship! That’s just great! And of course she did it because she loved it - what high schooler is willing to do an EC that they despise, and yet achieve at such a high level at it that they win a full tuition scholarship?

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