Springtime Is a Busy Time in the College Office

The annual college admission Case Studies event co-hosted by the Colorado Academy and Kent Denver college counseling offices will take place this year on April 4, 2017, at 7 p.m., in the theater at Kent. This event is for all Eleventh Graders and their families. CA Juniors are asked to attend with at least one parent or guardian.

 

Students and parents will be assigned to rooms where they will put on the hat of an admission officer for fictional Jefferson University, and with the guidance of a college admission dean, make decisions on four applicants. Families have found this program to offer helpful insight into what goes into making admission decisions. This year, 31 experienced admission professionals are volunteering their time and their office’s budget to visit Denver to take part in this great educational opportunity. The last half-hour of the event will be a mini college fair, a terrific chance to speak with decision makers at a cross-section of great colleges and universities from across the country!

 

Bates, Bowdoin, Case Western, Chapman, Colgate, Colorado College, Dartmouth, Dickinson, Earlham, Grinnell, Lafayette, Lake Forest, Lehigh, Miami of Ohio, Rhodes, Sewanee, Smith, SMU, St. Olaf, TCU, Trinity College, Trinity University, University of Chicago, University of Colorado, DU, Redlands, Richmond, USC, Wesleyan, Whitman, and Wooster.

We in the college office are in disbelief, as you may be, that it is already April. The second half of the school year seems to fly by. While the fall is a busy time with seniors and the application process, the spring calendar can feel even more scheduled as we meet with juniors to get them started, meet with their parents, check in with our college admission colleagues about the state of their pools, field many invitations to visit campuses, attend some important conferences, plan our Case Studies event, and try to keep time open to have continued conversations with our Eleventh and Twelfth Grade students as they navigate either the start or the close of their college searches.

 

This is a good time for all Upper School students to take stock, as a year winds down and they look ahead to a new one, having already made their course selections—an especially exciting opportunity for the sophomores and juniors, who get to choose from a broader selection of courses for the next year.

 

We tackle a lot of conversations in the spring about the “right” choices moving forward. These conversations often have anxiety about “looking good” to colleges at their core, and we strive to empathize and also help students take a longer view when deciding how to make the most of CA’s rich range of choices.

 

The most important thing you can understand about doing high school “right” is that you’re writing a story as you go—and that the more you’re invested in actively taking part in that story as it unfolds, the more likely that story will close with a happy ending—and the best ones are unpredictable at the story’s opening. If you try to write to a specific ending before the plot reveals itself, you are unlikely to be able to connect the dots in a way that will lead to the ending you desire.

 

The college application process itself is built around stories and storytelling. That may sound odd to a high school student right now. There’s so much talk about things like GPAs and test scores in high school—hard numbers that tend to draw our focus. Those numbers don’t mean much by themselves, in reality. A GPA alone doesn’t reveal whether you challenged yourself too little, too much, or just the right amount, whether you started off slow and are making progress every term, or whether you started with a bang and fizzled out. Your transcript tells a lot of this story, and you have the opportunity to shape it into your senior year.

 

So, students: do you feel confident, not so great, or indifferent to your academic record and extracurricular life so far? Does the record reflect your ability and your sense of yourself? Now that you have the lay of the high school landscape, you have the tools to directly shape your response to that question for next year and the years after.

 

There are lots of other stories that are still being written that will be told by your teachers, your counselor and by your essay. And then there are the stories you are writing for yourself:  to make sense of the choices you make for life after high school and to fit them into your personal narrative. If you feel like the story is being written for you, or that the plot turns available to you in the chapters ahead are becoming limited, ask yourself what small actions you can take to begin to change the story’s direction.

 

The following pieces of advice are selected from a handout we give to all our ninth graders at the end of the year, when we have a fun (we hope!), light version of a case studies activity with them. If students practice these things, we believe they’ll feel happy with the way their high school story ends, and how the college sequel begins.