Students: Help Your Parents Help You!
One of the challenges of the college admission process can be for families to work together in a positive way that results in a future plan that everyone is comfortable with. Teens who procrastinate and parents who are anxious tend to be common stressors for families. Here are some strategies and suggestions that students can use to better communicate with their parents and let them know how they can truly be helpful.
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Written by Deb Zatkowski
We live in a world of quick communications, text messaging, acronyms and short-handed ways to express ourselves because everyone is so busy! This usually works, and especially so when people can receive emails on their fitness devices and stay glued to their phones. Some of this quick communication is also part of the admission process as more colleges contact students via cell phone to send their own text messages and stay in touch in ways that reach students. Most of the time it is good.
Many students play a sport during their time in high school, but how do you know if it’s right for you? And, how do you know if you’re good enough to play in college? These, and other questions are addressed in this blog about how being a student-athlete changes the college admission process.
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It’s still August, but most high school students have gone back to school already, so we might as well embrace Fall with open arms. In the world of college counseling, that means there are very important items on every high school student’s “to do list” and we outline them here:
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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.
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.
You’re walking through the hall when you overhear a group of seniors talking about where they’re going next year. And at soccer practice, your junior friends are talking about the colleges they are visiting next month. It reminds us of a fun quote: “college is the reward for surviving high school.” Yes, you too will be researching and visiting colleges, but you’ve been told it’s not your time yet. There’s good reason for that, as we will explain below. However, there ARE things you can do now to make the college process easier later, and increase your chances of being accepted. Read on!
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 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.
It will be here before you know it; you will be handed a booklet, or given a website to view, and told to pick your courses for next year. This can cause the common “deer in the headlights” look. How do you even begin? In this previous blog, we outlined some common questions that students have when selecting their courses for the following year so be sure to read that, but in this blog, we will give step-by-step directions for how to make the best decisions about course selection for you.