- Get high grades in the most difficult courses you can handle in high school.
- Do well on standardized tests, but don't believe they are the key to the college door.
- Cultivate your intellectual curiosity/vitality in whatever sphere you like. (You don't have to pick a major to do this.)
- Get involved in some activity outside of the classroom, and perhaps outside of school. Where possible, seek out leadership opportunities. You don't have to have a long list.
- Think really deeply about your story - everyone has a story - and how you will tell it when the time comes. Or, in other words, what matters to you and why?
- Jon's advice on staying sane in this increasingly frantic world of college admissions is to plan to stay calm, don't put all of your eggs in any one college's basket, and realize that you can get a fine education at any school if you set your mind to it.
- What's really important to colleges when admitting students? Is it grades, honors courses, SAT's, essays, being an alumni child, being a star athlete, musician, or poet? They all CAN be important, but high grades in a rigorous program of study, including honors and AP courses where available, are the most important factor. Everything else is roughly tied for second place, but it varies from school to school and student to student. Anyone who tries to get more specific is misleading you.
- Visiting colleges is the best way to learn about them, but any visit is necessarily brief and partial. There are some crucial questions many people rarely ask.
- The most important thing you should ask about a college is its level of student engagement. It is not about whether the professors are good, or the classes are good, but whether the students care about learning. Student engagement is the energy that students put into their education. Believe it or not, it can be measured.
- Many students are afraid that a small college will be too confining and not have enough things to choose from. They are usually wrong. They don't appreciate what it means to have a professor who is actually interested in you as a person (some colleges actually change lives).
- With regards to the importance of college for job training or career preparation, it can be important if you have a good idea of what you want to do in life. This can help you find a college to study engineering, nursing, architecture, or business (the most popular major in colleges these days.) But a liberal arts education prepares you for life. The average person changes jobs several times in their career. Using four years to prepare for one career may not work out for you in the end.
Jon Reider, Ph.D., is director of college counseling at San Francisco University High School, an independent 9-12 high school. For Fifteen years he served as an admissions officer at Stanford University.
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