Sophomores!
When I was a sophomore in high school, my two primary focuses were hanging out with my friends and trying to unlock the unknowable mystery of Geometry (to this day, I cannot manage to transfer leftovers into the proper size containers). But if I’d been planning ahead, I would have started thinking about college.
Beginning the college process as a sophomore will give you time to really consider what it is you’re looking for from your college experience. Engaging with a college counselor (like us!) can help you to plan the exploration process. In the meantime, there are a few things you sophomores can handle on your own:
Academics: The single most important factor in the college admissions process is your high school transcript. This doesn’t just mean earning As and Bs (which you should be working toward), but enrolling in challenging courses, like AP and honors courses. Colleges want to see that you are pushing yourself and taking the most rigorous courses your school has to offer. And admissions counselors are always on the lookout for academic improvement, so if you struggled in something like -- I don’t know -- Geometry, you’ll want to demonstrate improvement in math the following year.
You’ll also want to be doing some SAT test prep. Khan Academy is a free test prep resource and a great way to get started.
Activities: Most high school freshmen spend the year getting their bearings. Sophomore year is the time for you to begin zeroing in on your extracurricular interests. Love sports? Why not think about coaching or reffing younger kids? Love theater? How about becoming a stage hand? Interested in volunteer work? Think about what that means to you. Is it working with athletes with special needs? Organizing a diaper drive for young parents in need? Volunteering for Habitat for Humanity? Remember, you can volunteer anywhere, so you want to think about where you feel drawn to help and how your personality and skills might best be used.
Your activities say a lot about you. By the time you apply to college, your activities list should tell a story about who you are outside of school. Make sure it's a story you feel proud of.
Sports: If you are a serious athlete contemplating college athletics, sophomore year is an important time. College coaches can’t contact students directly until the summer after sophomore year, but athletes can put themselves on a coach’s radar in advance of that date. Depending on your sport, you should consider the following:
Fill out the recruiting forms specific to the colleges you are interested in -- it’ll be located on the school’s athletic webpage.
Attend college-specific ID camps.
Email coaches to let them know the dates and times of specific meets, games, or matches you’ll be competing in in the spring and summer and invite them to attend.
Develop an athlete profile on one or two recruiting websites dedicated to your sport.
Hire a professional or ask a tech-savvy friend to produce a highlight real of your athletic performances to email to coaches and upload to recruiting sites.
While athletics may be incredibly important to you, you want to be able to choose the college that’s best for you, rather than settling for the college that chooses you. Starting early, and casting a wide net, helps you stay in control of the process.
Summer: The summer before junior year should be time for fun and relaxation. And at this age, it should also include a job. Having a job -- even one you do for just a few hours a week -- will show colleges that you are responsible, hard-working, and value the significance of a paycheck. At May First, we encourage all of our students to find jobs that demonstrate these qualities to college admissions counselors.
Your other summer activities will be a bonus, whether that’s babysitting your siblings, driving your grandmother to classes at the senior center, taking a challenging hiking trip, or learning how to paddleboard. How you choose to spend your summer helps tell the story of you.
At May First, we’re ready to help sophomores plan these next few months and then transition into that all-important junior year. Send an email to info@yourmayfirst.com or give us a call (617.851.9975) and let’s get started.
Reach, Target, Likely
Last week we wrote about decision rounds. This week we’re keeping the vocabulary lesson going by talking about the terms we use in list-building. It’s still a little dry... and still super important.
When we build a list for a student, we break schools into three categories: Reach (2-3 schools), Target (2-3 schools), and Likely (2-3 schools). For some students we add a fourth category: Wild Card. The single most important thing to note for these categories is that the schools in them will be different for every student. What determines this? Mostly academic fit. Translation: a student’s grades, overall GPA, and test scores. (We know, does the SAT still matter?! The short answer is it’s complicated. The longer answer is that it still matters when we’re building a list.)
So how do we define Reach, Target, Likely, and Wild Card? It starts by looking at a school’s statistics and asking, can this student get in? Or as admissions officers put it, is this student viable? And not only does GPA matter for this, but GPA in the specific high school’s curriculum matters… admissions officers know the difference between a 3.4 in all honors and AP classes at your high school and a 3.4 in general.
For a Reach school, we say a student has a chance of getting in, i.e. is viable, if her GPA is at the bottom of the average range for admitted students. The important thing here is that her GPA is still in the range of those of accepted students. Someone with a 3.2 GPA probably won’t be offered admission to a school where the average GPA of accepted students is a 3.89.
A Target school is one where a student’s GPA falls right in range with the average of recently admitted students. That same student with a 3.2 GPA is much more likely to be admitted to a school where the average GPA for accepted students is between 3.1 and 3.3.
A Likely school is one where a student’s GPA is at the very top or above the average of the most recently admitted class. A student with a 3.7 GPA has a high likelihood of admission to a school where the average GPA of admitted students is a 3.0.
The last category, Wild Card, is what we term Ivies and other uber-competitive elite schools; pretty much anything with an acceptance rate of under 15-20%. These are schools that could fill their incoming classes five times over with students boasting 4.0 GPAs, amazing activities, and brilliant personal statements. (Did you know that in 2019 50% of high school students graduated with a 4.0 GPA?!)
So where do test scores come in? Even though most schools are staying test optional for this admissions cycle, it can still be helpful to look at their average test scores when assessing a student’s viability. Again, looking to see where a student’s scores fall within a college’s range will help evaluate viability, even if that student chooses not to submit those scores. If I scored a 1060 on my SAT and the average SAT score for my dream school is 1400, well… that’s an indication that my chances of getting in are on the slimmer end. If my transcript (not just my grades but my grades in a challenging curriculum) and activities are outstanding, my letters of recommendation amazing, and my personal statement is well written, compelling, and tells a great story then admission is possible. And this is where we come in...
We love building lists for our clients and we love helping them put together their strongest applications possible. The best time to get started is in the fall of junior year... Send an email to info@yourmayfirst.com or call (617.447.0186) and let’s chat.
Common App: It’s Time
Hey Rising Seniors! The Common App updated over the weekend and is ready to go for the 2021-22 application cycle. (Juniors and junior parents-- if you’re wondering just exactly what the Common App is, sit tight. We’ve got a post coming for you next week.) There’s a new essay prompt (announced last February), and a new inclusive question about gender, but other than that it’s pretty much the same.
It’s only August, so why should you care? Because it would be awesome to start senior year ahead of the game and not have to panic in October when the reality of applying to college becomes really time sensitive.
So what should you do?
Gather all the materials you’ll need to create your account and begin filling in your demographic information:
High school transcript
List of extracurricular activities (school and community), work, volunteer experience (there is some strategy to how you write and order your descriptions)
Test scores from the SAT/ACT (more about this in a minute)
Parent/Guardian information
Academic honors and awards
As a senior, you’ll register for a “First Year Student” account
Add your demographic information
Name (make sure you enter your name as it appears on all your legal documents and transcripts so that everything matches up)
Home address
Date of birth
Phone number
Email address (make sure you enter an email address that you check regularly in case colleges need to get in touch with you; we often advise our students to create a gmail account just for college applications and check it daily)
Test Scores? Most of the colleges that went test-optional for last year’s cycle are staying that way for this year’s cycle. If you took the SAT or the ACT and did well, submit your scores (as we said in our earlier post it’s hard to know if this matters to merit aid- some schools stopped using test scores in their merit formulas, some didn’t and for the most part they’re not sharing that info).
What else should you be doing? Probably most important, you want to begin brainstorming ideas for your personal essay (who wants to be stressing over this in October?!), and looking through your college list to see if they require supplemental essays (more on that next week!). Lastly, you want to make a list of people whom you can ask for killer recommendations.
If you’d like help on building your list, writing your personal statement, and all of the other important pieces of your college application give us a call (617.447.0186) or send an email to info@yourmayfirst.com and let’s chat. We’d love to help.
Does the SAT Still Matter?
I hate taking tests, always have. It didn’t matter how well prepared I was-- when the teacher handed out the blue test booklet or the multiple choice answer sheet, my heart would drop and my body would flood with panic. I had friends who loved tests, would sit up a little straighter with their sharpened pencils --that just wasn’t me. The panic would always dissipate a minute or two into the test, but I never could figure out how to skip that panic altogether.
There are few tests that are as hyped, as panic-inducing, as written about as the SAT. It is a billion dollar industry (in 2017 The College Board--the “non-profit” administrator of the SAT -- generated over $1.1 billion in revenue. And that’s not counting all the private courses and test prep tutors that affluent families engage to improve scores). And for decades, The College Board and the elite schools that use the SAT to justify their admissions practices have argued that it is an essential part of assessing an applicant's potential for success. Their claim is that SAT scores are a better predictor of who will graduate from college than other factors. The truth is that there is a very minor correlation between SAT score and GPA and graduation rate, but the SAT on its own doesn’t actually predict much.
A much bigger truth is that the SAT is fundamentally flawed and biased. Just Google “SAT” and you’ll find article after article examining its inherent bias and racism against black and brown students and its inherent favor for affluent kids. Go a little further and you’ll find that the data of The College Board shows these issues in clear black and white numbers. This has led to an ongoing movement to do away with the SAT and standardized testing in general.
In the midst of the pandemic, almost all US colleges and universities went test-optional. Test date cancellations and testing center closings all but necessitated this. Most of these schools are staying test-optional for the 2021-2022 application cycle, in recognition that this year’s rising seniors faced immense disruption in their high school careers. And there’s also the not inconsequential truth that applications at competitive schools that normally require standardized tests went through the roof in last year’s admissions cycle (Colgate’s applications went up by 104%!). These record application numbers help out in the… you guessed it, rankings. (Though this is a bit of a catch-22 because rankings also love SAT scores.)
So when our clients ask us, “does the SAT still matter?,” we would really love to say no. Sadly, the answer, like standardized tests themselves, is murky.
If you’re a rising senior, the SAT is likely to be optional anywhere you apply in the coming admissions cycle. We wish we could say that means don’t worry about it! But as we said above, it’s murky: most schools that were not test-optional prior to 2020 used the SAT for two purposes-- admissions and merit aid. They have secret formulas that they use to award merit aid, and SAT scores are almost always a factor. The murkiness comes from the fact that while they went test-optional for admissions, not all of them went test-optional for merit aid… and this information wasn’t shared. So there are lots of students who didn’t submit scores, got admitted to great schools, but were only considered for aid based on their FAFSA and other financial information, not their academic achievements and potential.
For younger students, it’s even more complicated. While the University of California system is no longer considering the SAT or ACT in its admissions process (this is a really, really big deal and advocates for doing away with the SAT and ACT altogether hope it’s just the tip of the iceberg), it remains to be seen if schools that went test-optional in the pandemic will stay test-optional long term.
So what’s our advice? Well, that depends. Do you have a lot of test anxiety or are they no big deal? Are you likely to qualify for merit aid and is this an important piece of your college-funding plan? Are you planning to apply to schools that may start requiring SAT and ACT scores again?
These are big questions and we would love to help you sort them out. Give us a call (617.851.9975) or send an email to info@yourmayfirst.com and let’s chat.
I struggled in math. Now what?!
Last week we got a call from the parents of a student finishing his sophomore year. He’s a great kid and an excellent student-- hard-working but doesn’t take himself too seriously, engaged in his coursework, and curious about the world around him. In spite of this, he’s had a tough year in his math class. Where he earned A’s in all of his other courses, his final math grade is likely to be in the C+/B- range. He’s had some difficulties with the teacher-- they’re not a great fit for each other-- and Algebra is just tough for him.
His parents called to get our advice and thoughts on a few different questions:
How will this grade -- lower than anything else on his transcript -- affect his college applications?
What can they do over the summer to make sure he is prepared for the math portion of the PSAT (usually taken Fall of Junior year) and SAT (he’ll take it next Spring for the first time)?
How can they boost his confidence so the difficulty of that one course doesn’t affect how he feels about school or his ability to work through difficult academic situations??
Here’s what we shared:
The important thing to remember is that one less-than-perfect grade isn’t going to keep a great kid from getting into great colleges. While this class was a struggle for our client, we’ll help him build a narrative that tells the story of this struggle, including what he learned about himself and his ability to work through challenges. We’ll also strategize a plan for success in future math classes so that his transcript shows a trajectory of growth and improvement.
While we think it’s a great idea to spend some time this summer getting familiar with the PSAT, SAT, and ACT and doing some healthy prep work for them, we think it’s equally important to take a break from stress and anxiety and get some breathing room. And this brings us to #3…
Take a break! This past year (really 15 - 16 months) was really hard, like really really hard. High school students suddenly found themselves at home. With their parents. All. The. Time. Some students started this year fully remote, some hybrid, and some full-time and in-person. Some had their academic schedules totally reshuffled and classes taught in longer or shorter blocs. Some students who struggled with a particular class for a ton of different reasons couldn’t get the support they would usually have access to in normal times. It added up to a lot of extra stress and a lot of extra unknowns.
So what does taking a break look like?
In this case, we advised our client and his parents to focus on finishing out the year strong-- getting through final projects and tests with as much grit and grace as he could muster. And then, slamming the door on it for a few weeks, ideally a full month.
He needs some time to let his brain rest, to have some fun, to get some distance from the stress he’s been under. When he’s feeling restored, we suggested he start doing some twice-weekly work in math to review what he worked so hard to learn this year, to re-engage with what was confusing and keep working towards understanding, and lastly, to begin working with a test-prep tutor. While we expect most schools will stay test-optional for the coming year, it’s still a great idea to be prepared to take the SAT or ACT. There are amazing tutors out there who not only understand the tips and tricks for success but can also seriously help reduce test-taking anxiety, which always results in higher scores.
Whether you’re struggling with what to do after a tough course, want some advice on how to choose classes next year to strengthen your college applications, or want to build a strong narrative telling your story, we’re here to help. Give us a call (617.447.0186) or email us at info@yourmayfirst.com and let’s chat.