What High School Students Should Be Doing Over the Summer

The summer break can be a useful time for high school students. It is a time students can pad their resumes, enrich their academics, and get some serious college planning done. Here is a year by year guide for what students could be doing over the summer.

        As soon as students walk out the door on the last day of 8th grade, high school has begun. Depending on your state, child labor laws can restrict the amount of time these students are able to work. This is a great time to begin amassing community service hours which might be required for scholarships down the road. Even if they are not required, they’ll look good on scholarship applications and college admission applications. If students plan to play sports in high school, they might want to inquire about any summer training programs students already at the high school are participating in. Of course, they should attend their high school freshman orientation as well, if one is offered.

After freshman year, the things above hold true. Students might also consider taking
additional classes online. In this regard, it might be a good idea to have a rough
draft of all the courses a student plans to take for the rest of high school.
There might be some courses a student wants to take but that don’t fit nicely
into the traditional school year. Thus, squeezing something into the summer to
make room for such a course is often the way to go. The summer following
freshman year can be a great time for this as work restrictions might still
exist, there aren’t some of the other demands below, and students have experience
in high school level work. This is also an ideal time to take driver’s ed.

After the 10th grade, many students will hold jobs, they should still work to acquire
community service hours, and perhaps take coursework online. This is an
important time to start touring colleges. These students are just over a year
out from completing college applications so it is crucial that they begin to
put the list of colleges together they plan to apply to. Parents can take a
hand in this by scheduling college tours to coincide with summer vacations. All
colleges offer formal tours and you’ll probably gain more insight with these
than just walking around campus on your own. Lastly, rising junior students would
do well to spend some time studying for college admissions tests like the SAT
and ACT

Such tours can continue into the summer after the 11th grade. This is a good time to
reflect back and verify there were no failed classes that need to be retaken in
order to graduate. Students can also spend time reflecting and putting together
a list of accomplishments and points they want to be sure to include on their
college and scholarship application which will come as soon as school starts
back in the fall.

Just because school is out for summer doesn’t mean high school students don’t have anything they need to do. There are plenty of small tasks that can add up to big
accomplishments on the road to graduation and beyond.

Applying to International Universities

  The United States is full of great colleges and universities. However, America high school students aren’t limited to those. Indeed, the world’s professionals are being trained somewhere and that’s often at the quality colleges and universities in other countries. American students might find an international university is the right fit for them and here are some things to consider when seeking admission at one of these schools.

To begin, attending an international college should not be a haphazard decision. This needs to be a well thought out and targeted objective. After the all, the most important thing I can tell you about applying to an international school is to research, research, research. Everything you know about American college admissions may or may not hold water on the international stage. The importance of standardized test scores, academic performance, strength of courses taken, and extracurriculars can be vastly different than what you find in the American system and the value of these things can vary from one country to the next. You have to know what a specific college values in their selection process and you should never assume an international university considers the same thing in the same way as an American school does.

In order to do this effectively, you need to have a clear idea of what you are trying to do. It is not enough to say, “I want to go to college abroad. Maybe in China, Europe, or Australia.” You need something much more concrete than that. You need to be able to say, “I want to attend college in England and study international business.” That sort of direct approach will give you the ability to narrow your search and focus on a small number of similar schools. I should mention here too that no international university should ever be considered a safety school. If an American high school student intends to go to college but is overwhelmingly convinced they’ll attend an international school, they would be a fool to not apply to at least one stateside university. That’s just good practice and will provide an option down the road if something unexpected comes along.

The last point I want to make here is that if a student is choosing to attend an international school, they really need to tour it. Too few students take the time to tour American universities and there is much more involved in selecting an international school.  Just because you went to Dublin, Ireland in middle school or your aunt sent you a pretty postcard from there once doesn’t mean you are going to like the college in the city of Cork if you decide to leave everything behind and move there. It’s probably going to be an expensive trip, but you need to go feel these places with your own senses and with a college-bound mindset before you make this sort of monumental decision.

Of course, there is much more that could go into this topic but those factors can be too varied to explore here. With that being said, I’ll go back to my main point which is to narrow your search and do a ton of research. Only by doing that will you be prepared to seek admission to a four-year school and know that you are making an informed decision about a huge step in life.  

The College Board's Search Engine

As a student approaches college, it is crucial that they begin to prepare by researching institutions that are an appropriate fit for them. In the early goings, this can be done online and there are a multitude of resources on the internet that discuss the differences in individual colleges. There is one such resource in particular that I have found to be user friendly, comprehensive, and powerful.

        The College Board’s college search engine can be found bigfuture.collegeboard.com. This website is the landing page for the College Board’s post-secondary planning tool which includes excellent information on careers and steps on how to reach those careers. Perhaps, I’ll discuss those in-depth in the future. When, at this site, I find that I spend most of my time on the college search engine.

        This is a terrific tool. You’ll find it associated with the words “Find Colleges”. Once you access the search engine, you’ll find a series of filters on the left side. These are what make this site so great. The search engine starts with over 3700 institutions of higher learning in the United States. The filters allow you to boil that number down to a list of schools that might meet a variety of very specific needs.

        For many, this starts with geography and, indeed, that’s one of the filters. If you are certain you want to go to college in North Carolina you can search for only schools in North Carolina. Or, you could expand that to schools in the South. If you’re certain you want an urban setting, you can adjust your filters to that. Next, suppose you’re convinced you want to study geology--filter for that. If you’re hoping for a chance to walk on to a women’s lacrosse team, you’ll need to make sure your school has a program in that so you can adjust your filter accordingly. Lastly, what if you’re SAT scores are quite where you’d like them to be? You can plug those numbers into the search engine too and find schools that fit your academic capabilities.

I used SAT scores of 500 Math and 500 Reading and Writing as well as the other above criteria which is all pretty specific. That gave me a list of eight schools. There are some more filters I didn’t even use but maybe you’re not familiar with the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. That was one of my results. It’s a school I think I’ve heard of but don’t know much about. After all, no one can know everything about all 3700 colleges in the United States.

However, if I’m a future lacrosse playing, geology major with a 1000 score at an urban campus in the South, UNC at Greensboro is a school I need to know about. Now, I do and I can link directly to more information and the school’s website from the search engine. Maybe, I wouldn’t end up at a school like UNC at Greensboro but at least it’s on my radar now and that’s really the point of this exercise. Using this tool can expose the student to schools that are actually a really good fit for them but that they might not know about. I’d encourage any student to play with this early on in high school in order to find a crop of schools to consider as they move closer to graduation.