Posting this question on behalf of my son soon to be entering 9th grade. Later this month the HS is doing a freshman orientation where students have the chance to see course offerings as well as clubs and EC’s. He is very interested(at this point) in getting into Jerome Fisher. What electives would you recommend to help get onto the right track? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of business courses offered. Here is the HS curriculum electives offered by his school. Thanks.
From briefly skimming over the link you sent me, I would highly suggest taking the leadership extracurricular mentioned. Penn, and Wharton more specifically, adore leadership in every form. Whatever opportunity to you have, take it with leadership in mind (e.g. if I join this club can I become captain one day? can I become editor? can I start my own club and be the president?) Anything in the STEM field would also be really effective, especially engineering and anything technology related. If there are coding classes, definitely take those. Business courses aren’t as important as you can take summer courses or do internships to show your interest in that later on; most schools don’t offer business courses.
Some other things to consider:
I know it’s a long way away, but this summer program should definitely be something you work towards as a shorter term goal than acceptance into M&T. http://www.upenn.edu/fisher/summer-mt
Coding. Make sure you get some experience with this. Do a course over summer, pick it up by yourself, or find a class that offers it. Everyone I know who’s in M&T has had some sort of experience with this I’m quite sure.
Leadership. Like I said, this is super important. Make this part of the focus in extracurricular choices.
Entrepreneurship. This is also really crucial and is essentially what M&T stands for. My good friend in M&T is a junior at Penn and has already done 3 startups. Get experience with entrepreneurship, whether it’s an internship, a summer course, coding for someone else, or better yet, start your own business! Try and make it something about technology and you’re golden.
There’s a lot to keep in mind at this point as your kid is in 9th grade. It’s a good idea to make a plan for how you ultimately plan to get into M&T. This is something I did for my program of choice (Huntsman) and it was effective. Dissect the website, scrutinize all the information you can get, and plan accordingly. What do they want, what does your kid like doing, and how can you combine the two. Good luck!
Thanks for the reply. It’s going to be more difficult than I even thought at first. Having really only 1 elective to choose from makes it nearly impossible…4 core and 1 foreign language(each year) leaves only 1 elective to choose between his likes of business, STEM, computer, and medical. He is currently almost finished with Khan coding as well as many hacking level teachings. The leadership, STEM and medical are all 4 year courses.