You work your way through the grind of early high school. You take your required math, english, science, and history courses. A foreign language course may be required, may not be. Finally, it’s junior year or senior year, and you have fulfilled the graduation requirements and can just sit back and take electives now, right?! Not so fast. In this blog post we explain why all the “fun” options for junior and senior year courses are really an easy trap to fall into if you’re looking at selective colleges and can hurt your chances of being admitted.
Have you heard that some colleges are test-optional? Perhaps you did but weren’t sure what it meant. In this blog, we will cover the basics you need to know and common pitfalls to avoid.
You have likely heard the terms before- weighted and unweighted GPA- but the definition of those varies significantly from high school to high school and college to college. In this blog, we will go over the important details to know and shed some light on this complicated topic.
At Campus Bound, we typically don’t advise students to focus on specific colleges until junior year of high school. We provide more information about that in this recent blog post. However, some eager sophomores may want to get a jump start on certain things, including the college recruitment process for student athletes. In this blog post, we explain why an early start is helpful and the tasks that can get done now to ease the process down the road.
This time of year, Campus Bound counselors are working with juniors around the college exploration process. Putting together a solid college list and visiting schools is at the top of the priority list. But while that’s going on, juniors are also studying hard to earn good grades in their classes, and taking standardized exams like the SAT and ACT. And the scores are coming in. But, what happens when you get your score back and it doesn’t seem right?
We may be biased, okay we are definitely biased, but Campus Bound students are the best. We are so lucky to have worked with some pretty amazing students over the years. For this week’s blog, we decided to tap into the experience and knowledge of our former Campus Bound clients to see what advice they have for students currently going through the process, or who are about to go through it.
Taking a gap year before college is something every high school student should at least consider. Even if it’s quickly dismissed as not the right path for you, it makes sense to have a discussion with your Campus Bound counselor about what it is as well as the pros and cons. We have explained more previously in this blog post. In this blog, we will go over the different types of gap year programs, and if you are considering it, how to decide which might be best for you.
Many juniors are well into the research phase of the college admission process. This is the time when students have to do some deep soul-searching, often with the help of parents and counselors, to determine the qualities of a college that are most important to them. Every student’s wishlist will be different. But oftentimes, students don’t know where to start. Of course, meeting with a Campus Bound counselor will help, but we also present in this blog the four big questions to ask yourself as you begin exploring different colleges.
Many eager juniors are kicking off the college process by taking an official SAT or ACT. Before you do, however, we offer some important and practical advice to consider.
This is the time of year when juniors tend to kick off the college process. During their first meeting with us, we college counselors ask them, “have you thought about where you’d like to attend college?” We ask about the size of the school they would prefer, what they’d like to study, etc. And then we ask, “Do you know where you’d like to be located for college? What part of the country/ what state(s)? And, in my experience, around 75% of students say, “Someplace warm!”
