Juniors: Keep your grades up, think summer, and imagine
/Now that high school seniors have hit SUBMIT on their college applications, attention in high school guidance offices nationwide has shifted—to juniors. For those eleventh graders who plan to attend college, most of the application process lies ahead, and the path is bound to be bumpy at times. But according to several independent college consultants I interviewed, maintaining good grades and keeping a calendar of key events and activities will help to limit the headaches.
I have plenty of opinions about applying to college, but they’re based on anecdotes related to my own children and the students who come to me for essay-writing support. Independent college consultants, on the other hand, advise their clients on the entire gamut of elements within the application process, and they are armed with facts. They visit colleges and universities (sometimes dozens each year), they speak with admissions officers, they know acceptance rates, and they work hard to understand the specific academic, social, and cultural objectives of each student they work with.
Not surprisingly, stress is a major issue in the application process, even at this early stage. In fact, some juniors already feel as though they’re behind. Not so, says educational consultant Marcia Kramer of Plan the Path (https://www.planthepath.com/). Kramer advises juniors to focus on today. “Do well in your classes, enjoy your activities, and try to keep balance in your life,” she tells them. Kramer, who is based in Montclair, works with both traditional college bound students as well as those who have faced academic and personal challenges.
Being mindful of what’s coming up the pipeline will also help to keep worries at bay. Spend some time with the 2019 calendar. Which events, like standardized testing, will need some preparation, and which are in-the-moment activities? Carolyn Allison Caplan, a.k.a. Admissions Mom, recommends figuring out sooner rather than later whether the SAT or the ACT is the better test for you. (Comparisons are available online.) “If you’re considering highly selective colleges, make sure to take the SAT subject tests,” says Caplan. She also advises students to finish testing before senior year if at all possible. Caplan is a private college consultant based in Houston and online at https://www.admissionsjourney.com/ .
Keep in mind that more and more colleges are becoming test-optional. That said, test scores may be required to be eligible for scholarships. Be sure to read each application’s “fine print’ before opting out of standardized testing.
Then there’s summer. How students spend the months between junior and senior year matters. But certainly it can be something you love to do, and it doesn’t have to cost anything, says Montclair-based independent college consultant Barbara Gottesman of No Stress College Help (http://nostresscollegehelp.com/). She suggests identifying an activity “that’s both fun and related in some way to what you might want to pursue in college.” Consider, too, that colleges give high marks to students who hold down jobs during time off.
Most juniors I’ve ever known spend time imagining what college will be like. My oldest kept a notebook dedicated to her college search. She would pull it out during tours and information sessions. Collecting facts and ideas in a kind of college commonplace book—like a Pinterest board in notebook form—made it easy for her to reference her feelings and findings about each college and university she visited. Montclair-based college consultant Robin Abramowitz views touring as vital to the process of building a college list, as well as a big adventure. She helps her students create an initial list of schools based on their interests—“a city school, a school close to home, a big ‘rah-rah’ school, a small school, and so on.” But the magic is in visiting campuses and, Abramowitz says, in considering what it would be like to be a student at each school. “Talk to students, have lunch in the cafeteria, visit the library, check out the campus bookstore. Be in the moment,” she advises.
College-specific websites are great resources for an initial dive into a school. Houston-based Caplan also steers students to several books and websites that she likes, including The Fiske Guide, Colleges That Change Lives (ctcl.org) and Niche.com. She suggests visiting any colleges that might be near where you live, whether or not you’re interested in attending, to help you identify what type of school will feel right to you and what vibe you’re looking for. Begin to think about fit, she says, adding, “Instead of trying to figure out a dream school, focus on what you see yourself doing and being on campus. Then look for schools that fit you.”
Independent college advisor Susan Perlstein helps her clients “keep application anxiety to a minimum by breaking the various tasks on their to-do lists into manageable pieces. For instance, today we might discuss testing strategies,” she told me. “Next time we will talk about the criteria they are looking for in a college or what they think they’d like to do over the summer.” Perlstein, who is based in San Francisco, also reminders her students to take “me time” when they need it. She can be found at http://perlsteincollegeadvising.com/.
Will tensions mount as deadlines move closer? Sure they will. But it might help to recognize, as Caplan points out, “that parts of [the process] will be awesome, especially as you learn more about yourself over the next eighteen months, and other parts will just be hecking hard.”