There’s no bad time to get started with the college process, but starting early definitely works in your favor. There are numerous steps involved, including course selection, maintaining good grades, standardized testing, and college selection, just to name a few. Starting early gives you the best possible chance later on. We like to think of it like a deck of cards. Imagine you’re sitting at a table and you’re dealt a hand of cards. You hope that maybe you’ve been given some good ones, but there’s an equal possibility that you have a hand of duds. But what if you could choose the cards you’re dealt? What if you could plan it out for yourself and decide which cards to hold and which cards to play? That’s what it means to start the college process early. You pick out the cards and are in greater control of what happens. 

Freshman and Sophomore Year 

These first two years of high school are integral to future success. Here is where you set up the building blocks for the rest of your high school career. In your freshman and sophomore years, you want to first start by setting up good study habits and learning how to manage your time. High school gets progressively harder, so it is crucial that you learn how to study effectively and how to manage your time. At first, it’ll seem too easy – you have so much time in your day to get your work done, why worry about managing your time? But the key is starting early. If you work on these skills now, by the time you get to your junior year and the workload increases, you already know how to handle that increase, and it can lessen the potential impact on your GPA. 

Additionally, these two first years put you on the path for more challenging courses down the line, and you want to make sure that you are preparing yourself. We’ve seen students decide to take easier courses in their first two years in order to get their GPA as high as possible, only to realize that they aren’t then prepared for some of the more challenging higher level courses later on. Instead of only focusing on having a perfect GPA, think more long-term. What are your overall academic goals? Do you want to take AP or IB level courses? What will you need to take in order to be prepared for them? You want to look for classes that are going to pose a challenge: classes that push you to think more critically and require you to broaden your horizons. 

Similarly, it’s important to get and maintain good grades, and one of the best ways to do that is to build good working relationships with your teachers and guidance counselors. Too many students try to muscle through on their own and then later wonder where they went wrong with a test or quiz. The reality is that your teachers hold the keys to academic success. They are the ones who write the syllabi and know the curriculum inside and out, so who better to help you on your quest for success? By building these relationships early on, your teachers come to learn who you are as a person and as a student, and they can help you further down the line should you start to stray off course. These are also the same teachers that you’ll want to come back to when you’re looking for recommendation letters, so it’s in your best interest to develop and nurture these relationships. 

Finally, now is also the time to figure out what extracurricular activities you are passionate about and want to be involved in. Extracurricular purely means outside of the regular curriculum, so don’t limit yourself to only the activities that your school offers. Spend time

discovering what matters to you and what you want to spend your precious free time doing and truly commit to those things. It’s important to fully dedicate yourself to your passions and to also think long-term here. Many of these clubs or activities will have some form of leadership structure. Do you aspire to ascend to those levels? Or, perhaps, are you noticing a lack within your community that you feel led to address? 

Junior Year 

This is where we see the meat and potatoes of the college process. During your junior year, it’s imperative that you start researching colleges and narrowing down the criteria of what you want in a school. There are an enormous amount of factors that go into school selection: size, location, majors, and affordability are only a handful. Start the research process early in your junior year, and take a little at a time. As you start consistently researching different schools, you’ll start noticing patterns. Are you seeing that the majority of the schools you’re drawn to are large schools? Are the prospective schools on your list all located in a specific area? From there, you want to start compiling schools to visit. Researching schools is a great way to get a general idea of what the school is like, but the only way to know for sure if the environment is right for you, is to actually set foot on campus. Schedule a tour and information session to hear from admissions officers and students directly and use that information to further guide you. 

Standardized testing also plays a big role this year. You can choose to take either the SAT or the ACT, depending on your preference, and having high scores will certainly help to strengthen your application. In a world of test-optional, and occasionally test-blind, admissions, it can feel like testing is a thing of the past, however, having higher scores will actually help your application. For schools that are test-optional, submitting your scores provides admissions officers with an additional metric to better understand the type of student that you are. Additionally, test scores are used as a potential qualifier for merit-based scholarships, so adding them to your application does open the door to further financial aid. 

Additionally, using those scores and your current academic profile, it’s important to section out your list of schools into three categories: reach, match, and safety. As you’re researching, take note of what each school is reporting for their profiles of accepted students. Schools will show the range of test scores and GPAs of their admitted students, and you can use that data to see what your chances of admissions are. Labeling a college as a reach school means that you fall at the lower end of their range of test scores and GPAs, meaning that gaining admission here is going to be difficult and potentially unlikely. Conversely, you will fall at the top end or even above the ranges for a safety school and being admitted here is a greater probability. Match schools are a lot like Goldilocks’ perfect porridge – just right. For a school to be a match, you should fall right in the middle of the ranges making admission a real possibility. It’s important to note that there are no guarantees with college admissions, and we have seen students denied from safety and admitted to their greatest reaches, but by breaking down your list into these three categories you can gain a better understanding of your odds. It’s also important to strike a balance of these three categories. Having a list of primarily reach schools can set you up for failure without a safety net, but having a list of mostly safety schools is playing it entirely too safe and not really challenging yourself to dream bigger and reach higher. You want your list to have a mix of all three with a strong focus on match and safety schools.

Last, but certainly not least, is the college essay – the all-important chance to tell schools about who you are. In recent years, we’ve seen more importance placed on the college essay as more and more students apply to college with increasingly similar academic profiles, leaving the essay as one of the distinguishing factors between who is admitted and who isn’t. The college essay is your chance to pull back the curtain and to show admissions officers what makes you tick. It’s a moment in time to really humanize yourself and allow the person reading your application to understand who you are beyond what they see on your transcript and in your test scores. As such, it can be difficult to write. What exactly should you write about? Are there topics you should avoid? In short, yes. You want to avoid talking about controversial topics, such as political views, but in essence, you want to pick a time in your life where you learned something about yourself and how that’s affected your life until this moment. Take your time with this essay and craft something truly beautiful and reflective. 

Senior Year 

And now we’ve come to the final leg of our journey to college. At this point, it’s critical that you know how to effectively manage your time. Senior year is an especially busy time because you’re juggling a number of things: college applications, college visits, school work, extracurricular activities – it can be a daunting task. Managing your time and creating a schedule to get everything done on time is an essential part of achieving success with applications, and having your parents and guidance counselors there to support you will also help. Share your timeline with the important adults in your life so that they can help you course correct if you fall behind. Your guidance or college counselor will also be by your side for the rest of the way. They’ll submit a letter explaining your school’s curriculum along with your application, so sharing the burden with them is of the utmost importance. 

But what exactly goes in the schedule? Great question. First on the list is the college application itself. Many colleges use the Common Application or the Coalition Application that streamlines the process. If the schools on your list use one of these programs, you’ll fill out your personal information only once, and then you’ll need to work on the supplemental essays. These are going to be typically more short-response essays, ranging from as little as 75 words to even as high as 800! It’s difficult to predict just how many supplemental essays you’ll need to write ahead of time, so you want to be prepared to schedule time every day to tackle them. Perhaps, you’ll be lucky and only have a handful or maybe even none, but depending on what schools you choose, you could have over a dozen to write! There are also some schools that use their own separate applications entirely, so you have to schedule time for those specific applications as well. Next on the schedule are financial aid forms, namely the FAFSA and the CSS profile. In order to qualify for any federal financial aid, all students must fill out the FAFSA. This is another step that you will need your parents or guardians for since it requires their tax returns from the previous year. Some schools will also require students to fill out and submit the CSS profile, which is run by CollegeBoard – the same company that administers the SAT and AP courses. The CSS profile uses much the same information as the FAFSA and is used by colleges to grant school specific financial aid. Both forms have deadlines that need to be adhered to, so it’s critical that you schedule time for them both. If you’re considering applying for an arts program, such as film, drama, or painting, it’s likely that you’ll also have a portfolio that needs to be submitted

and potentially auditions to attend. Make sure to factor both of those possibilities into your schedule. My applications are finished now! What’s next? Well, now are the all-important decisions, which also have a deadline. Schools need to know if you want to accept the spot you were granted or if you’re going to attend somewhere else, but before that decision is made, schedule time to compare the financial aid packages granted by the schools. Which programs are going to best meet your needs academically? Which schools are offering packages that will meet your needs financially? This isn’t a decision to be made lightly, so make sure to schedule enough time to truly sit down with the important adults in your life and deliberate. 

Applying to college is a marathon, not a sprint, but by starting early, you can reduce the number of hurdles in your way. Starting early will make researching schools and compiling balanced lists much easier and will potentially reduce the amount of stress and anxiety surrounding applying to college.