(As an illustration, it has taken me scattered, lucid periods over four days to write this brief post.)
But given that school is starting soon, I thought I could maybe help my friends with high schoolers by passing along the advice I used to share with my upperclassmen when I was a teacher. I'm no admissions counselor, but I helped many kids get admission and scholarships, so I think it is sound information:
Pay attention to your schedule and adjust if necessary.
Colleges want to invest their openings and certainly their scholarship money on students who present themselves as worth the effort. They like students with a diverse set of interests and those who are clearly up for an academic challenge.
If your senior year consists of general-education English, math, and science courses and then four sections of gym (I've seen this specific schedule from an ostensibly "college-bound" senior), then you don't seem like a safe bet.
Make sure your schedule shows you want to take the toughest classes possible. To have AP next to a class on the transcript, the course syllabus has to at least go through a perfunctory review by the College Board to prove it appears rigorous. That AP designation shows you are ready and willing to do college-level work, even if the grades you receive in that course aren't straight A's.
Nothing substitutes for challenging core courses. If you want to go to nursing school, for example, it doesn't impress an admissions counselor if you are taking "Medical Terminology" while taking bare-minimum science and math requirements.
Once you have a challenging schedule, choose electives that look good and provide valuable skills. For example, in my experience, Journalism and Public Speaking courses are often considered "fun" classes by students, but they also can markedly improve your written and spoken communication.
Get FAFSA done quickly.
Financial aid is given out first-come, first-serve based on your eligibility. I always suggested putting the FAFSA form in the place where your parents sit most of the time (kitchen table, bar in the kitchen, coffee table, whatever), and asking them to check it every day to make sure you have filled out everything possible. The moment you have all the necessary information to fill it out completely, mail it in.
Be methodical in college acceptance test prep
Don't just keep aimlessly studying and re-taking the test. With practice tests available online, at school, in your library, etc. look at the questions you are missing and start figuring out if there are patterns. A tutor or teacher at your school can easily help you with this analysis.
For some sub-tests, this process can be hard. The ACT Reading, for instance, essentially tests your ability to quickly process different types of profoundly boring passages; raising your score through mere test prep is not likely to do much if you aren't a strong reader.
However, for the ACT English test, another English teacher and I tutored one girl using this sort of error analysis and she raised her score 9 points between her 3rd and 4th attempts at taking the test. This was only the most dramatic example, but I've seen plenty of students raise English and Math sub scores 3-4 points with just focused error analysis guided by a teacher.
There are other things I can share when I feel better, but hopefully this will be a few valuable notes for those of you with upperclassmen thinking of college admissions.
