Genuine Self-Improvement for College Applications

The College application process is tough and unforgiving. You have to stand tall among hundreds of thousands of hopefuls and convince committees of adults whose sole jobs it is to read dozens of applications a day to choose you. You have to do so with maybe ten flimsy sheets of information. When you get rejected, there’s no appeal or explanation-you’re left hanging dry, not knowing if you were inches away from approval or directly tossed into the shredder (not literally, you silly). So how do you make the best of this system?

What you can do depends on how far you are through your high school career, but you can definitely do something to improve your odds no matter where you are. I’ve been through the thick and thin of this process and I’m going to show you what you need to know to have a better shot at your dream school.

Part 1. Enriching your High School Experience

Many contenders with very diverse and competitive portfolios have been outright rejected from the best schools they had fully expected to get into with their outstanding resumes. While this could happen to any candidate, it most likely happened because the committee discovered a hole in their folders, a hole that they couldn’t explain considering the strength of the applicant.

That hole is your heart. Admissions officers know how much load the best students can carry, and they can sense your phoniness. You have to invest your time wisely into activities you actually enjoy and develop those activities. You can develop a passion by practicing until you get good. You’ll know when you’ve achieved proficiency when people start complimenting you and you draw attention. Once that happens, you get self-esteem boosts and surprise you start to enjoy yourself! From there on it’s a positive feedback loop and you can get very far if you haven’t started too late.

I used to be absolutely terrible at basketball in middle school and would avoid it. After three years of practice, I can say that I’m a decent player for 5’7, I get complimented regularly about my defense and my grit and that I enjoy it, despite never being on the team. That’s a far from ideal situation.

In the ideal situation, you invest your time in a hobby for all of high school, even during the summer if you can, get leadership positions and win prizes and competitions. What if there are no competitions and no leadership positions to be had? No problem. If your hobby is woodworking, painting or horse riding, you can still demonstrate your involvement through your application and your essays, but more on that later.

Why is all this important?

Admission officers want to see a mature individual with developed strengths and interests that will either serve their sports teams or enrich their campus. Having a passion that you’re invested time in is exactly what they’re looking for, and it also shows that you have your life in control, that you have ambition and that you are patient. These are all valuable qualities to have for a successful college student and a successful person.

If you’ve done something for a long time and nothing outstanding has come out of it, don’t worry. You still demonstrate the qualities admission officers are looking for, it’s just not your time to shine yet. Odds are that if you throw energy, time and passion into something, it will pay you back. See if you’re missing any of the above in your commitments, it might be time for some self-reflection.

I can’t understate how important is commitment. That’s what failed the strong applicants. They throw themselves everywhere trying to satisfy admissions, and that’s the wrong mentality to take. Ever notice that you become the center of attention when you’re passionate and enjoying yourself? The admissions committee can tell that from paper. Don’t overload yourself. Experiment with different things early on, but make some order in your file by junior year. Stick to a few and drop the others. Which ones you keep is totally up to you. You will get recognition from almost anything if you get good enough at it.

Part 2. Grades and Standardized Tests

You’re going to hear about several acronyms that you will be glad to leave behind by the time you’re out of high school: GPA, SAT, ACT, AP and IB are the big ones.

Keeping a healthy 3.5+ GPA is pretty much mandatory to get into the top 20 universities in America and the world. Unless you have an extraordinary alibi, have gotten deep into some remarkable endeavor usually only done by people older than 30, have groundbreaking athletic ability to convince the coach that his team needs you, are the Last of the Mohicans or are the child of the dean, you won’t get in with a  GPA nearing or below 3.

You’re here because you have none of the game-breaking advantages I listed above. Fundamentally, there is no other way of climbing head and shoulders above your peers except academic performance, because most top universities around the world focus on academia. Everything else in your portfolio combined cannot make up for bad grades. 

That being said, everyone has his own method of doing well at school. What all high scorers have in common is focus. You have to crunch through the schoolwork whether you like it or not, so settle down, turn off the music, phase out the distractions and for your own success, get your work done before you let yourself go and have fun. Once you establish a habit of procrastinating by doing things you like to do before work, it’s going to be very difficult to get out of it and it will screw up all the work you try to do until you change this habit. Don’t half-ass your work, at least until second semester of senior year.

Do all the homework that counts and contest a bad or unfair grade. Don’t be confrontational, but rather ask how you can improve and whether you can do anything to help your grade. The nice or apologetic teachers will offer you some kind of extra credit and the grumpy ones will feel bad about giving you a bad grade next time, especially if you’ve noticeably applied their tips. About extra credit, many tryhards jump blindly at each extra credit opportunity. Consider carefully how much time and effort you need to invest and how many points you’re getting in return for each extra credit opportunity, and think if that time and effort could be better invested by studying for your next test. Some teachers give generous extra credit for meager tasks, and some give a rat’s tail for an appalling amount of work.

High school grading isn’t fair at all and high school teachers are that much more imperfectly human than college professors. They will almost subconsciously select favorites among each class and you can “prime” them into always giving you a better grade than you deserve by being nice and well-mannered, participating eagerly in class, impressing them with intelligent remarks and questions and scoring well in the first few evaluations. Once you do that, unconscious positive associative bias will kick in every time the teacher sees your name on the test. There’s nothing you can do about quantitative tasks and multiple choice except practice and know your material, but this first impression helps tons in subjective classes. Make your teachers feel uncomfortable for giving you a bad grade.

Standardized testing is about as terrible and unfair as you’d expect. The SAT and AP are administered by the same entity, ETS, and their tests and formats change very little from year to year. The material is often incongruous with what you’re being taught at school, which means that you have to study the test rather than the material. The best way to guarantee a high score in the SAT is to take a lot of practice tests, first untimed, then timed. There’s a formula for the essay which is available in any SAT book. Buy a practice test book, sit down every weekend and crunch some test problems. Take an SAT class from a reputed company if you want. If you see enough SAT problems, I guarantee you your score will rise itself. Take the SAT once or twice in your junior year and once in the fall of senior year. Start practicing in sophomore year, this is an evil you can’t avoid and will help you if you have a less than stellar GPA.

AP Tests are a different beast. You can either take a class at your high school or self-study an AP. It does cost a lot of money, but I encourage you to take as many APs as you can that are relevant to your future plans and have a decent chance of contributing to your college curriculum. Avoid Art History and Psychology and you can afford to not take a second foreign language exam or English Literature if you’ve taken English Language. 

Part 3. What to Expect

Part 4. The College Essay

Check out my guide here.

https://dongkunguo.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/collegeessay

Part 5. A Recommendation about Recommendations

Part 6. Do your Homework

Part 7. Interviews and You

Check out my guide here.

https://dongkunguo.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/collegeinterview/

Part 8. Avoid Getting Screwed

Part 9. The Bottom Line

You’re not done yet.

https://dongkunguo.wordpress.com/2012/04/02/collegefinal/

Part 10. You’re in! Now what?