Hi, everyone! I am a freshman and will be graduating in 2022. As the competition for colleges become increase I have decided to start focusing on college now. My dream school is Vanderbilt and I am planning on applying for ED (obviously during my senior year). I am mostly looking for help on what I can do to get in and any advice that some graduates or upperclassmen may have. My main focus being the medical field.
I suppose I will start by providing some background on what I am involved in currently.
I have a 4.9 weighted GPA as I have been taking high school credits since my 6th grade year. (A program my school offers).
-I have taken the ACT once just to get a feel of what it is like and received a 29 composite. However, with more studying I should be able to get it up.
-I am currently enrolled in Pre-IB and take all honors.
Extracurricular Activities:
-HOSA (Health Occupation Students of America) - I have been in it since 8th grade and got 1st at state for my event and qualified for internationals.
-Debate: currently I have a district spot for state qualifiers and and a district spot for nationals.
-Model UN
-Student Council
-Violin: I have received consistent ones and will be going to state this year for a duet as well as small ensemble.
-Tennis, but I am only upper JV.
Medicine related activities:
-I volunteer at my local hospital
-I am in a program called, “ACES”, where essentially you take courses at a college related to medicine and get to shadow doctors.
-I take a few biomedical related courses online as well as at my school.
I plan to be involved in a research program my junior year and will soon be entering an essay competition about genetics. Beyond that I am planning on taking the SAT subject tests for Biology (molecular), English and U.S. History.
If you have any advice for me on things I should be doing or cutting back on I would really appreciate it! Thanks
I would say keep up what you’re doing, but also pace yourself, as the cliche goes, “it’s a marathon, not a sprint”. You may want to focus on fewer ECs, and allow yourself to go into your favorite ones a lot more seriously. Not only do schools like that, but it’s a lot more fulfilling to invest into a few things that really interest you than trying to keep up doing a limited amount in multiple activities.
An important point - don’t get obsessed with a single school, especially if the school has low acceptance rates. Even for kids with the best profiles, most are rejected.
Thanks for the input! Extracurricular wise I am kind of struggling on trying to figure out what to drop (if I do). I have a bunch of schools I’m looking at right now, but ah going to VU would be so nice. @MWolf
My advice would be to not worry about college yet. Everything you’re doing already will be great for your applications, so I would just keep doing what you enjoy, do well in your courses, and try to take some time to relax. You have all of junior and senior year for college admissions.
A certain amount of personal space and privacy is helpful as you develop respect and appreciation for Vandy and other great colleges. Keep your crushes and opinions about colleges off of social media so you can be as fickle and curious as you should be to maximize your options. Do not use your real name. Do not use IDs that have one school referenced in them. Use IDs that protect your privacy so that you can smoothly get advice from many sources, alum and so on. It’s ok here to state your home state, type of high school, and so on but do not reveal too much online. Give yourself tons of room to change your mind and to “date” multiple colleges. Do get shrewd --not just smart. Shrewd people know that a 9% admission rate for Vandy in RD and 19% for ED equals hundreds of deserving and fully qualified students not admitted. Shrewd people don’t pay full price for private schools unless your pow-wow with your parent units gives you rock solid ground to expect that to be A-OK. Do anticipate that graduates of fine universities and colleges often have graduate school to fund. Allow the costs of graduate school to seep into your brain and learn more about different career paths and costs involved. (Two big alerts: many law and med schools require your parents’ income information till you are 28! (yes, a bit shocking!) We, for instance, were under the false illusion that state flagships for professional school would be offered at an in-state discount. In State professional education in law and medicine for instance…turned out to be quite expensive and similar to private institutions. Make your undergrad budget while thinking ahead.
Make Excel charts for your top schools on things like admission rates, deadlines, costs.
Some career paths offer subsidized paths to top graduates who want PHDs (hard sciences, and other arenas as well.) Some graduate school paths are not that difficult to pay for while working full time. Some graduate school paths are lucrative enough to help you pay back loans.
Things I would do between now and junior year: Get a couple of regular paid jobs. Stay physically fit. Stay in the game without having to win at everything. Read broadly. Take your quantitative level as high as you can in high school. Try to get good at lab work so that college lab hours will seem familiar. Make sure your writing samples in high school are getting serious scrutiny to up your skill set. Try hard to get that foreign language mastered in high school so that you are not forced to start over in college. Do the entry level jobs for freshmen and sophomores in your extra curriculars with great good will and effort. You can reassess in a couple years and make choices.
Test scores matter a lot for Vandy, so make an effort to be good at rote learning. Prep for all your AP exams and Subject Tests exams with the practice books. Understanding the exam is really half the game.
Learn how to make an appropriate college list. It should include your flagship college instate. Take pride in America’s private and public college institutions and in the very unique history of each place. Find out what their Board of Trustees sees as the next phase of the college. Read the school newspapers online.
Slow down and pace yourself @22saed26, You are not just leaving others in the dust, you are not leaving any dust for others to trace you at all!
Don’t be obsessed about getting into XX and being a doctor as this age, you have plenty of time think about that in college. High school is a time for you to be yourself, to explore, to grow as a teenager, not as mini-version of a grown-up you.
College won’t care much if you spend all your spare time volunteering in a hospital. They know your mind are not set at this tender age. They don’t put much stock in you being a doctor than you do.
Your ECs are all too common. If these are what you love to do, then go with full gusto and excel in a few of them. Don’t spread yourself all over the places.
