Giving dynamic and inspiring presentations is one of our most favorite pastimes here at Guru. We have the wonderful privilege of giving a presentation tonight to an LISD high school for the lower grades, and we know there are lots of parents who won't be there tonight who would love this information, too! The information below is the handout that goes with this presentation. Happy learning and thinking! 

9th Grade: 
1. Support your student in choosing challenging but appropriate classes. 

• A student’s performance in his/her core classes (English, math, history, science, foreign language) every year is the most important data point in a college admissions decision.
• Draft a four-year course plan to chart out his/her classes. Consider looking at the classes required by some colleges to help you plan.Encourage your student to try out lots of clubs and activities. Try everything! Be sure to include some volunteering experiences.

2. Begin a resume draft.

• College resumes are different than job resumes.
• You can find a template your student can copy and use here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TWICCAn7FFAIyeV8iEtk9gHFBrSedJ65gp-A4EFGHbc/edit?usp=sharing

10th Grade:
1. Settle in to 2-3 activities. Encourage quality and being really invested in a  few clubs/activities instead of having a minor role in many activities.

• Aim for a community service activity. Encourage volunteering with the same organization on a regular basis.
• Get involved with at least one activity through the school. Colleges value evidence of students’ abilities to contribute to their academic communities.

2. Start exploring aptitudes and interests

• Try the Myers Briggs test at www.16personalities.com (free!)
• Consider aptitude testing at www.youscience.com ($29)
• Use the UT Wayfinder tool at https://wayfinder.utexas.edu (free!)

3. Update the resume
4. Take the PSAT in October. Use is as a benchmark, and don’t stress too much about the results. Colleges do not see the PSAT scores – they are just a tool to help your student begin to familiarize himself/herself with standardized testing and understand strengths and weaknesses in content knowledge.
5. Consider an academic summer program.

• Look for free ones – there are so many!
  • Engineering: UT MITE (http://www.engr.utexas.edu/eoe/recruitment/mite)
  • Engineering (girls): Create@UT (http://www.engr.utexas.edu/wep/k12/createatut)
  • Leadership: Caminos al Future at George Washington University (https://summer.gwu.edu/caminos)
  • Math: Texas A&M SMaRT Camp (https://www.math.tamu.edu/outreach/SMaRT/)
  • Business: University of Houston Explore Business (https://www.bauer.uh.edu/undergraduate/prospective-students/high-school/summer-camps.php)
  • Computer Science: Code Longhorn at UT (https://apps.cs.utexas.edu/camp/code-longhorn)
  • Pre-Med: Camp Med Academy (http://txaheceast.org/dfw/about/campmed/) 

​Parents: you know this on a rational level. The day your child wakes up in his dorm room as a college freshman will not magically turn him into a responsible and self-sufficient adult. He won’t suddenly spring from him bed unprompted with his homework complete and go eat his Wheaties in the cafeteria. He has to learn to do that before he gets there. The person your child is at the end of high school is that same person that will start college. That means the habits they’ve cultivated, the skills they’ve learned, and the etiquette they employ (or fail to) are the tools they are equipped with to succeed in their new environment.
 
It’s your job as a parent to make sure they are ready, and in this case, doing more means doing less. As your child progresses through high school you need to do less in order to allow them to do more. This is called a graduated release of responsibility. It’s hard. It’s scary. It’s sometimes messy, but it’s necessary.
 
Not sure where or how to start? In our work with students we’ve identified a subset of skills we believe all college-bound students need in order to succeed.

1. Be in the habit of checking email daily. This is easy. Kids have phones on them. Help them set up a professional sounding email address and link it to their phone. What’s key, though, is having some meaningful information be sent via email. You can put in your child’s email address, for example, on the coach’s email list, or on the group emails sent from the high school counselor, or anything else. You can also email your child links to articles that are relevant to things you’ve discussed. If they are going to check it, there has to be information there worth checking. Cultivate that content for them to establish this habit.
2. Know how to keep their schedule. This is a big one. Kids can and should make their own appointments, know when those appointments are, and get themselves there on time. Kids need to learn to communicate with others to keep their commitments and prioritize their time accordingly. They will mess up; resist the urge to jump in and take over. We learn by doing, and that means mistakes. Mistakes are okay. Mistakes are good. Mistakes are learning.
3. Understand failure is normal. Failure is a normal part of life. But the perception of high-stakes in college admissions has many teenagers (and parents) petrified of failure. In business school, they teach you to pivot when you fail (because failure is more normal than success in business). Kids need to learn this in life, too. Failure is a sign to make changes, adjust accordingly, move forward in a different fashion, try something else. Failure is not a referendum on your propensity to succeed. Colleges don’t want perfect snowflakes (really). So embrace failure and teach your kids to pivot.
4. Think long-term. Teenage brains are hard-wired for short-term rewards. Model and practice goal setting, both short and long term. Teenagers are capable of doing it, but it doesn’t come natural to them, yet (not until their pre-frontal cortex is fully developed. This happens sooner for girls than boys).

Start now to help your student acquire these skills before you ship them off to college. Yes, college is a time for independence. But you have to equip them with the skills they need to thrive with that independence, first. Start releasing bits of independence to them gradually, knowing they will screw it up more than a few times. Then go practice your own long-term thinking by remembering it will all work out just fine in the end. Really.

​I fall asleep most every night reading articles about admissions trends, cognitive psychology, goal-setting… I eat this stuff up.
 
But I also read things that make my stomach turn. Some of these nausea-inducing pieces come from others in the business of college admission counseling, and some of it comes from well-meaning parents who have heard bad information from other parents—things like their child needs to be “branding” themselves in order to look good to colleges, or test-prep ought to start in ninth grade, or the higher “ranked” a college is the better it must be. It makes me want to scream, “Stop the madness!”
 
College admission planning is stressful for students and parents. This is the most scrutiny (whether real or perceived) many students will have undergone thus far in their lives. There’s adolescent (and sometimes parental) ego at stake, hinged on the idea of getting in or being denied. It’s also an incredibly expensive proposition, one where understanding actual costs is nearly impossible up front. There are acronyms to decipher (SAT, ACT, AP, FAFSA, CLEP, IB), classes to choose, leadership skills to cultivate, tests to prep for, colleges to research… If all that worry is left unbridled, it can lead to poor decisions that adversely affect the student. Decisions like turning your child into a “brand” or spending thousands prepping for a PSAT test in tenth grade that doesn’t even count for national merit (and national merit doesn’t necessarily live up to it’s reputation for being a golden goose, anyway!).
 
Stop the madness! There is such thing as too much test prep (or starting test prep too early), your high-schooler does not need a “brand”, and the Ivies are not the only colleges worthy of effusive fanfare.
 
I believe in purposeful planning, using accurate information. This has the effect of bringing the stress inherent in this process down a level. My students have plans for when they will start test prep and they understand why they are taking the tests at the times allocated. These are things any student can create for himself or herself. I also believe we best serve students when we help them find authenticity as opposed to a synthetic identity manufactured to get them in to college, as if getting in were the end goal (it’s not). Teenagers are in the midst of discovering themselves. Let’s not stifle that process by inserting an idea of what “looks good” to an admissions committee into the mix.
 
Instead, let’s help them understand the pursuit of knowledge is more valuable than a weighted GPA or class rank. Let’s protect them from unnecessary and premature stress by allowing test prep to start when it’s an appropriate time. Let’s do the best by our kids by teaching them to be themselves, giving them tools to discover what that means, and challenging them to do so with intrinsic motivation.
 
For my students and me that means engaging in goal-setting and aligning select activities with those goals. It means looking at a broad range of colleges, including some you might not have heard about before (You’re interested in research and you want a scholarship? Skip Cornell and try Rhodes).  It means fostering authentic interests and pursuing them relentlessly. (If you are a student of mine, you have probably heard me tell you to pursue two or three activities 100 miles per hour with your hair on fire).
 
I am passionate about what I do because I believe so strongly in the power of higher education. It’s the opportunity to unlock not only doors to a future career, but doors to a more liberated mind and better life. But students have to be taught to value it as such, and when we teach them to brand themselves, pursue a grade instead of an understanding of a subject, or place their self worth in the prestige of their admissions decisions, we are teaching the wrong values. 

A few weeks ago, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education released a report called “Turning the Tide: Inspiring Concern For Others And The Common Good Through College Admissions.” It has received praise for its call to action for colleges, especially elite colleges, to de-emphasize test scores and the number of AP classes students rack up, and instead focus on more intangible qualities like students’ awareness beyond themselves, demonstrations of kindness, and ability to contribute to efforts to improve what’s good for the community.
 
While it’s wonderful to see the report make explicit such factors, in reality, these things are what good college counselors have been stressing to students for years. These things are also what have made students (well, those without a hook) stand out from the pack in the competitive college admissions game all along. It’s nothing new, but now we have a report to bring awareness to the masses.
 
Will you still need excellent test scores to get into Princeton? Absolutely. Has it always helped you to be able to complement those excellent test scores by demonstrating your capacity to affect change in your community? Yes. Duh.
 
Good test scores, grades, and a bazillion AP classes have never and will never be enough to get a student into the most selective colleges in the nation. The students who get in are those who, in addition to having evidenced their smarts in their academic records, show they are capable of being change-makers. Harvard wants to admit students whom they believe have the capacity to do great things, and that capacity cannot be measured through a standardized test.
 
So what’s our advice? Really, it’s the same as it’s always been: if you are serious about getting into an elite college, focus on showcasing your personal qualities through your extracurricular pursuits. But here’s the trick: don’t do any of those things for the purpose of getting into college. Instead, you need to be motivated by a sincere desire to affect change around a cause for which you feel passion. So change your headspace; start by asking yourself what problems in the world you want to solve, then go about working to find solutions or ways to contribute to solutions. The rest will fall into place on it’s own. And keep your grades up: those will always matter. This is education, after all.

Volunteering. Something every high school student knows they should do, usually because they believe it’s a prerequisite for acceptance to college.

Don’t get me wrong, colleges like students who volunteer. But if you are going to go through the hours required to volunteer just for a college, let’s look one level deeper and think about the logic therein.

Think about the answer to the “why” of it all. Why do colleges like students who volunteer? It’s because most colleges are places focused on betterment: betterment of the individuals it strives to educate, betterment of the community in which they operate, betterment of the world through innovation and progress. They want to bring students to campus with those same ideals.

Because of this, not all volunteering endeavors are created equal. If the only reason you are volunteering is because you think you have to for college, or because your mom is making you do it, or because you have to do it for NHS, you probably aren’t making an impact worth the time and energy you are exerting. Dare I say you are wasting your time? Maybe. Up for discussion.

Believe me, admissions officers can tell the difference between those students volunteering because they “have to” and those that are excited to be there for the opportunity to make a difference, learn new skills, or otherwise be a conduit for betterment.

If you show up once a week at the library to organize books just so you can record the hour on a piece of paper, you aren’t impressing anyone. This is not to say you can’t do good work at the library, you can and should, but only if you are really interested in that work, learning new skills, and making an impact you are proud of.

So then, what is impressive and how do I find those opportunities? What’s impressive is when a student spends his time involved in something he cares about. It could be related to his career interest (teach tech skills to the elderly, coach a little league team, intern at a local law office, run adoption events for the animal shelter, plan a program at the library using what you’ve just learned in AP Computer Science…).

A good number of these types of activities are not posted online. Instead, they require you to get out and talk to people. Talk to your friends’ parents, pick up the phone to call a local business, chat with the front desk at your vet while Fluffy gets his shots updated. Tell them you are interested in helping. Ask if they need help and what you can do about it. And don’t be discouraged when you hear no. It’s not personal.

Now, and in life, the best opportunities are those we create for ourselves. You have to go and find them, and that usually requires putting yourself out there by talking to people.

That can be scary for a 15 year old; I know. I was painfully shy for a longer portion of my younger life than I care to admit. But it won’t get easier until you get more experience with it. And if you aren’t ready or willing to do that yet, consider in part your readiness for college. If you want to go to a selective school, test scores alone won’t get you there. Think about the traits you are cultivating within yourself through your activities, and make adjustments with your goals in mind. That’s what high school is all about! 

School is out (or nearly out for some of you -- sorry! Keep studying!), so is it time to click the brain off and the new "Summer Jam" playlist on? Not completely, but there's a happy medium here. Let's talk about that.

Everyone needs a break, and provided you've worked hard this academic year, you should take a little respite (see how I snuck in that SAT vocabulary?! Clever, huh?) to recharge your jets. Burnout is real thing, and one you really want to avoid (junior year is classic burnout time, which is dangerous as junior year is the year eyed most closely by your list of desired colleges for application). 

Because of this, we don't recommend cramming your summer full of nonstop intense activities like volunteering in South Africa in June, attending Calculus summer camp in July, then rounding things off by winning the national golf championship in August, all while taking an online SAT prep course. You need some down time, and you should use this opportunity to take it. On the other hand, sitting on the couch watching MTV's "Awkward" for three months isn't exactly fueling your intellectual, spiritual, and cultural well-being. Somewhere in the middle of these two summertime extremes is the perfect zone in which to find yourself. Here are some questions to help you figure out how to spend the next three months both challenging yourself to grow and recharging in preparation for next year's adventures:

1. What do you enjoy doing most? 
During the school year, it can be hard to find the time to do the things you love to do. Summer is a perfect chance to pursue things you love simply because you love them. Don't choose activities based on what you think will look best to colleges someday. Instead, choose to unabashedly pursue your passions to their full potential. Colleges actually love to see you doing this; your passions are what make you YOU, and that's what colleges want to see. Love cooking but can't fit a class into your AP-packed schedule during the school year? Do it in summer. Got an itch to satisfy your creative potential by learning to use that nice camera your Dad has in the closet? Teach yourself this summer (there are awesome blogs out there for this!). Do what you love, and don't feel like you are wasting your time doing it if you enjoy it. That's what summer is for (at least, while you are a teenager that's what summer is for. Once you get to be old like me, summer is like the other three seasons, only hotter). 

2. How can you give back? 
Summer is a perfect opportunity to volunteer. There are too many volunteer opportunities out there to name, so when deciding where to volunteer, think first about what you can offer, next about what you enjoy doing most, and then about whom you can be of service to. Search local volunteer opportunities through your city or online. However, don't be afraid to contact an organization, non-profit, or business to see if they could use your help. Often times they can work with you to find a way to utilize your skills, even though they may not advertise the volunteer opportunity elsewhere. In other words, don't be afraid to talk to people to create the opportunity you want to pursue. Colleges consider it a big plus to see you spending your spare time bettering not only yourself, but the community in which you live. There is much to learn from volunteering, and you might be surprised by how helping others recharges your own batteries and fuels your soul (cheesy, I know, but true!). 

3. How can you keep your brain running?
This is important, but it doesn't have to be the main event of your summer. Keeping yourself in the habit of using your brain is a good thing. You can do anything from practicing a vocabulary list, to reading ahead with your lit class book list, to spending a week studying physics at a university camp. These are all great options and not so intense as to put you into burnout mode. Choose one or two academically oriented things to do this summer and that should suffice. 

The key to your perfect summer is to blend these three pieces in a way that works best for you. Do the things you love (travel, write poetry, build a fort), find a way to help others, and keep your brain active. 

The last piece of advice we have is, if you are going to be traveling, see if there's some time to tour colleges along the way. Even if you aren't interested in the school in the city where you're staying, you can still learn a lot about the options available to you in higher education by learning about that university. As always, we can help by answering your questions, talking to you about options best suited for you as an individual, and most everything else related to college planning. Call or email with questions!

For those who believe college applications are processed by some magic formula in which GPA’s and test scores are added up, you are (mostly) right. Seventy-five percent of an admissions decision is based on straight data (this is an average from a study by the NACAC, the actual importance varies from university to university). Candidates are reduced to mere numbers – how many APs? What’s the GPA? What’s the critical writing score?

But GPAs and test scores aren’t the whole picture, and the last 25% of that admissions decision is made up of some very important pieces that can mean the difference between acceptance and rejection.

So what’s left? There’s the essay (try this if you are looking for help with your essays), the letters of recommendation, the resume, and your extracurricular activities. Extracurriculars (as they are known around the office) are anything and everything you are doing outside of your academic life, and they go a long way in helping decide what you are really all about in ways the numbers simply cannot. Extracurriculars help the admissions officer figure out how you might contribute to her campus, and how you will spend your time while in college, presumably in similar ways to that which you did in high school.

So what should your student be doing and when should they be doing it? Let me answer those questions in reverse order: students should have started, like, yesterday (i.e. get moving now). College applicants can include any extracurriculars students have participated in from ninth grade on, so starting right away is best. Beginning early is essential for two reasons: it enriches the student’s life in important ways, helping them to cultivate maturity, and it allows ample time to acquire leadership experience.

Leadership is a glaring weakness on many applications, and here’s why: if you wait until senior year (or junior year even) to join the Robotics club, you aren’t going to waltz in and be crowned president. You are (probably) just going to be member. Those leadership roles that are worth the time and effort require you to be invested years before assuming them. So start early. Like now.

Now, as to which extracurriculars are best, the answer is the ones that the student is most interested in. Really, truly, I mean that. Never do (or force your child to do) something just because it looks good (or you think it will look good) on a college application. Students don’t flourish in those environments; they don’t learn, they don’t grow. Instead, have the courage to let them pursue their passion (I know, terrifying)—but by all means, make sure they choose a passion. And Call of Duty is not a passion (in most cases, at least). That’s the compromise: they get to choose, but it has to be something meaningful, significant, stimulating, challenging—something where they can contribute to have a positive effect on others and themselves.

So what exactly can they do? There are way more options out there than you might think. I work with many students who aren’t jazzed about sports, aren’t inspired by theater, or aren’t breathlessly excited about slam poetry. So what’s a kid to do? Create his own opportunity.

I love when students do this. It shows initiative, gumption, and passion—huge plusses in life (and the college admissions game). Here are a couple rock star examples from kids I’m working with this year.

One stellar young lady wants to pursue a degree in computer science. She’s doing cool things like teaching herself to code using apps on her phone, but she is lacking in extracurriculars and leadership. After a little brainstorming and planning, she came up with the idea to use her passion to teacher seniors in assisted living centers about technology that will allow them to connect with their families across the country. Ever try to Face Time with grandma? That’s the problem she’s trying to solve. This project is in its beginning stages but has so much potential, and I am seriously excited to see what she does with it.

Another student was struck by the hunger statistics she learned about in school that show one in five children are living in food-insecure households. Her response? Start an organization to collect unused food from restaurants like Panera that would otherwise be thrown away and deliver it to local food pantries and homeless shelters. Lots of work cut out for her here, but it’s so awesome on so many levels.

Help your child find an area of interest and figure out how he can use it to make the world a little brighter. He will learn so much in the process and end up with a heck of a line item for his extracurricular resume (or better yet, something to write about in his personal statement).

Questions? Want help? Email me: [email protected]