For our first event of the year, we had an amazing turnout of nearly 150 high school students, parents, and even school counselors!
However, since not everyone was able to join in on the fun, here were some of the key takeaways:
- Use the "echelon" trick, aka bucketing your schools of interest into REACH, TARGET, and SAFETY categories so you can diversify in terms of the competitiveness of the schools that you're applying to.
- Some parts of the admissions process (GPA, test scores, AP/IB scores) are thresholds. Before you even apply to a school, you want to make sure you’re in range based on those statistics.
- Other parts of the admissions process (essays, leadership, recommendations, extracurriculars) are differentiators. These are all of the things that will make you unique, and how you’ll fuse those into your application pitch to the admissions committees.
- The college admissions process is all about taking risks. The risks you take (with your essays or other parts of your application) may not be to everyone’s liking. So long as it’s smart, thoughtfully done, and VERY WELL executed, you are likely to FORGE A CONNECTION with at least ONE awesome school!
- A common misconception about scholarships is that you need to be in a certain socioeconomic status, have certain grades, or have other strict requirements to be eligible for scholarships. In reality, any student can find and apply for scholarships that fit their unique interests and profile!
- Key places to search for scholarships include:
- The Access Scholarships Search Engine!
- Reaching out to your teachers, looking on your school's website (and surrounding school's websites, etc) to find local scholarships. These opportunities are usually, but not always less competitive than national opportunities
- Set SMART goals for yourself as you go through the process of searching and applying for scholarships. Doing so will keep you organized, on track, and better set up for success.
