Guidance for a seventh grader

Applying to College
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<p>Silver<em>and</em>Jade- I think the situation warrants it.</p>

<p>Green Rabbit: Don't 'What if'. Things will change. 'What if'-ing only leads to disappointment when things don't happen.</p>

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<p>for probably the first time ever I completely agree with snoopy. that's probably the best advice you'll ever get here.

great post.</p>

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<p>I'm feeling all warm and fuzzy....</p>

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<p>I think snoopyiscool is cool.
But I'm not sure you're going to listen to snoopyiscool because I don't think it's what you want to hear. </p>

<p>As someone who looked forward to college from a very young age as a route out of a poor situation at home, I can empathize with the mindset to focus on college even in 7th grade. So I'm going to take the time to write this because I think this will be beneficial, and I hope you take the time to acknowledge that and read this. </p>

<p>I joined CC as a frosh, sorta, but basically only lurked. The frequency of my lurking increased over the years as it became more relevant. During winter break of frosh year, I checked out two or three "insider" books on how the college admissions process works--I figured that I could learn what there was to learn when I had the time, since I'd be bogged down by more and more things to do as I progressed through high school. So if you're simply trying to be prepared with knowledge, go ahead and do some research on what college admissions is about----but then set it aside. </p>

<p>Don't try to become someone that you think the colleges will want. Looking around at the results this year..there really isn't a way to game your way in without donating enough money to your choice school to construct a building(or two...or three.) </p>

<p>The basics pretty much are good grades, interests, and a clean crimincal record. </p>

<p>A lot of things will happen between where you are now and where you'll be years from now. Some good, some bad. LIFE happens in high school, in a really real way, for the first time for most people. Things greater than college occur----amazing athletes get injured, unable to continue their sport ever again; home lives can sometimes explode; eating disorders and depression can be problematic. Then there's the real downer: Death. These are very real issues--and high school will test you, challenge you, and change you. Your values will shift, hopefully. Because it's not really 'high school'---it's being a teenager and shifting to the life of being an adult. </p>

<p>Then there are the good things. You'll probably stumble across things you never thought of doing...and find them incredibly interesting! Leave room for that. I'm glad I did...I ended up doing things that I am very proud of that I never planned on doing. Others around you will effect changes too. You can't really plan--life doesn't work like it. It throws too many curveballs. </p>

<p>Don't waste life doing things you don't want to do. </p>

<p>As time wore on, and I thought to think more about mortality and the use of life in general, I gradually quit everything I wasn't interested in...college admissions be damned---</p>

<p>The most important part here:
I figured I didn't want to go to a school that only wanted a fake application instead of me.</p>

<p>Don't fake an application: Don't create a person for them to like. Rather, find a school that wants you for who you are, genuinely. </p>

<p>Result?
I got into my first choice school--which, since you since to care, is in indeed an "Ivy". </p>

<p>To get there I:
1) Maintained good grades. Yay!
2) Got some sleep the week of the SATs(no test prep hooray--and yes, sleep will be quite beneficial)
3) Pursued only the interests I liked and quit the ones I didn't.
4) Lived life and became a person I liked.
5) Looked at both the Ivy's and Non-Ivy's, the prestigious and less prestigious, and picked and chose the ones that I fancied, irregardless to prestige. Try to like a school for something besides its prestige, that'll last longer than the one week after you get in. </p>

<p>Most of your life will be post-college. After your first job or so, few will care where you went to college anymore. Enjoy life at every stage, in every moment. Be responsible, maintain your values, and be someone that you're happy to wake up to be everyday. </p>

<p>"19. Use a rubber"
Lolz! Keep it safe, y'all.</p>

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<p>justbreathe: word dawg</p>

<p>and yeah the rubber thing: hpv is negligible to guys but to girls it can cause cervical cancer</p>

<p>wrap up your tool and protect your lady friends, playa</p>

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<p>You know you're talking to a 7th grader. Granted, these are things needed to be known. But keep it discreet, y'all.</p>

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<p>lol....my bad...i kind of forgot..heat of the moment you know?</p>

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<p>Thanks Sheed</p>

<p>and what's all this talk about a rubber (condum?)</p>

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<p>green rabbit, I know that you have grand dreams. BUT, you are only in 7th grade!!! Get through junior high first, then take a look at your dreams; odds are they would have changed.</p>

<p>Junior high is the part of education where not only are you given a <em>lot</em> of personal freedom (compared to elementary), but you don't have to worry about education a whole lot. So please, take advantage of it. Anything you could possibly do now will not affect your future significantly as far as college goes (unless you do something drastic like commit a murder or something).</p>

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<p>Green, one positive thing i can tell you is keep that attitude of wanting to succeed. I don't know what math you are in now, but for your attitude i would say, at least take algebra 2 by 9th grade. I was happy with geometry by 9th grade, but i don't know if you would want advice from someone going to a JC instead of IVY. Like justbreathe said, do what you enjoy and love. I hated english and got by with C in every english class i took (except 2 semesters), but i never took APs for english. I only took APs when it came to math/science and to tell you the truth those classes didn't really stress me because i enjoyed them.
good luck green.
I have a feeling if you do get rejected from those colleges (Hopefully you dont), you will go on a mass murder rampage.</p>

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<p>green, I had similar test scores when I was in 7th grade and similar ambitions...</p>

<p>The best thing you can do is dissociate intellectual excellence from ivy league acceptance in your mind...After you break 1400 on the SAT, there is not a great correlation between who is the smartest and who gets in. Based on what you have told me, it will probably be easier for you to become a professor at Harvard then to get accepted to Harvard as an undergrad.</p>

<p>Only the top 50 math people in the U.S. are really assured of admission to the ivy leagues and even that might have changed. By top 50, I mean according to the math olympics qualifying exams. To get to the Math Olympics tryouts (MOP--top 50), you would have to score highly on the AMC, then AIME, then USAMO. I know people who were perfect students, were concert-level classical musicians, and qualified to take USAMO, and were rejected from Harvard/Princeton/Stanford. (There are only about 150 USAMO qualifiers in the country.) The point is that it is just about impossible to get in through sheer intellectual firepower.</p>

<p>If you need a concrete thing to shoot for, try to win a National Merit Scholarship. Only the top 2,000 students in the U.S. win one--it's very exclusive. The process is like applying to college. If you make it over 200 or so on the PSAT, you are a National Merit Semifinalist. Almost everyone becomes a Finalist who was a Semifinalist unless you have terrible grades. At this point you send in a couple of essays, a recommendation from your counselor, and your transcript. A lot of schools give out scholarships for national merit finalists, but this is not the same thing as the official National Merit Scholarship awarded by the College Board. My best advice to win one is to be the best student your teachers ever had at a place like Horace Mann. It worked for me. I didn't go to Horace Mann but I did go to a place that had 70 National Merit Finalists in my senior class and was basically the best student in every class. The reason why I suggest this as a goal rather than getting in ivy league schools is because winning the National Merit Scholarship is more straightforward and scholarship is almost wholly what they look for.</p>

<p>Incidentally, I got into 3 out of 5 of the ivy leagues I applied to--good but not great considering that I was much, much smarter than the guys that got into all of the ivies. I also got into MIT and CalTech, however. It's getting more competitive every year though so it might be harder for you. However, I don't regret my approach to high school--I got a lot more out of it than people who were running around like chickens with their heads cut off assembling meaningless extracurriculars, even if those people got into the top ivies. </p>

<p>What I'm trying to tell you is that you are way too intelligent to worry about what these people in the ivy league admissions want. For starters, ivy league classes aren't necessarily any better than classes anywhere else, even state school. Second of all, if these admissions people were that smart, they would be doing cancer research or doing theoretical physics...they don't necessarily identify with intellectual people. However, there is nothing wrong with tailoring your application somewhat to what they want, particularly if you don't let it interfere with your intellectual growth. </p>

<p>I would say the summer is the best time to get an EC that you can write about. (Most people wait until after the junior year.) Do some volunteering in a third world country and write about it for your essay. Or do some economics project dealing with a third world country and tie it in to what you want to do--economics. If you are applying to college, don't just list math as a major, list math and economics and say that you want to apply your math to economics. That way you won't be competing against the math olympics people in the ivy league pool. However, your excellence in mathematics will benefit you. For the top ivies (but not MIT and CalTech,) the best approach to your essays is to emphasize the humanistic qualities of your experiences and activities rather than simply the intellectual qualities of them. </p>

<p>Another thing I've seen people who get into Harvard have is that they wrote for a newspaper--a real newspaper. Not like the New York Times, but some small newspaper for their hometown. I have no idea how you would do this. You would probably have to approach them after you have written for a year for your school paper or something--just a guess. The so-called "hook" that might mean the difference between admission and rejection might require you to get a little out of your shell. Again, I would try to arrange it so these time-consuming EC's are done in summers and/or breaks from school. Remember that these are just side things.</p>

<p>As for suggestions to further your intellectual growth, if you want to take some exciting classes that are the equivalent of high school honors classes, I would suggest looking into the CTY program at Johns Hopkins or the CTD program at Northwestern. <a href="http://cty.jhu.edu/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://cty.jhu.edu/&lt;/a> They are designed for bright middle schoolers and early highschoolers. They are short but intense--they cover the entire book in 3 weeks. Like 5 hours a day of lecture or lab. I enjoyed it tremendously, and its only 3 weeks so you will have plenty of time to do other stuff in the summer. </p>

<p>Also, I imagine you probably will end up on the math team at your high school. A favorite type of problem for math contests (AMC, ARML, etc.) is divisibility problems. Once I took a course in number theory, I found these to be much easier. Most of the random math tricks I encountered in math team were presented as a cohesive whole in number theory. Plus, number theory is pretty independent of other math--even a grade schooler could learn it. If you picked up a book on it, you could easily learn it yourself. </p>

<p>Hm...more suggestions. When you read, try to write down words you don't know and look up their definitions later. It will improve your vocabulary. Also, when you are studying a subject, try to challenge what they are saying. Don't just be a trash receptical for knowledge. Strive to making rigorous arguments. If you see an equation, know what is behind each piece of it. This is especially important for economics, where people constantly misuse equations because the equations are based on incorrect assumptions. Try to look at things in as many different ways as possible. Anthropomorphize science: why would a particle behave this way? Use analogies. Try to find a connection or similarity between two different things. Find something that doesn't make sense. Often they have glossed over it in a textbook, or maybe it's because the theory is partly wrong and they haven't really discovered the way it works. </p>

<p>Last of all, don't spend too much time on-line. It can be addictive. Most of these people on this website have no idea what they are talking about anyway; even those that got into ivies really have no idea why. </p>

<p>I hope I didn't freak you out too much. Even if you do none of these things except for being a great student, getting into grad school will be incredibly easy for you. So don't do too many things that you don't enjoy or don't feel worthwhile just to satisfy what you think admissions committees want.</p>

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<p>I'd just like to add that most of the stuff I mentioned you don't need to worry about until after your sophomore year of high school. Even if you did some crazy extracurriculars now, they wouldn't really count anyway because your in junior high. So like everyone else said...enjoy yourself and have fun. If you want to take a summer class or study math independently because you enjoy it, then go ahead. But if you don't want to, then don't. When you enter high school, you start with a clean slate anyway.</p>

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<p>Soooo, looks like you don't want to listen to our advice, or have you?</p>

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<p>
[quote]
Thanks Sheed</p>

<p>and what's all this talk about a rubber (condum?)

[/quote]
</p>

<p>ROFL! hahahaha. Just proves, don't worry about college yet.</p>

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<p>lol.. yea i know.. at least we know he actually is in 7th grade ...lol</p>

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<p>seventh graders are adorable..haha</p>

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<p>Since you sound very much like how I did ninth grade, I'm going to tell you what I think. </p>

<p>On worrying/activities:
Typically, when you're filling out college applications, you're asked to mention accomplishments that you've made in high school or have continued into high school. Because of this, your stressing out in middle school might not be all that useful to you, and, in fact, it could be counterproductive. Echoing what people above have said, the best thing you could do for yourself is probably to discover and explore something that interests you. Focusing excessively on purely academic work and on the college admissions process can make you into a one-dimensional robot... Try to avoid becoming one... do something, not just to get into college, but to satisfy your love for learning; I think you'll find that doing so is a lot more rewarding and enriching to your life/mind than an acceptance to a selective college. </p>

<p>On thinking about colleges:
Having not yet attended college, I can't say much about college life. I can say with great confidence, though, that "fit" is much more important in terms of your personal growth than reputation/prestige. Just bear in mind that there are plenty of schools outside of the Ivy League/Stanford/Chicago that you could be very happy (and maybe even happier) attending. For a while I thought that I wanted to go to Brown, but right before my senior year I realized that I actually wanted to go to Cornell. <- basically, it's unlikely that you'll know where you want to go, or what you even want in a school, for that matter. </p>

<p>On SATs:
For a seventh grader, your scores are impressive. And they'll certainly get better as you move into 10th/11th grade. Don't worry much about SATs now, because if you are, you could be using your time much more effectively. Working for one summer (maybe summer of soph. yr if you want to start early) out of a review book can produce unexpectedly positive results. </p>

<p>But honestly, it's middle school, you won't regret doing well (but not overworking yourself) in school and at the same time having fun, hanging out with friends, etc. But you might if you stress out too much.</p>