You collapse onto your bed after a long day of school and practice, but your day is far from over. You take a short power nap, then spring up to finish your homework. Hours later, you finally stop to rest, but you then realize you still have to complete your Common App essay. Blurry-eyed and barely awake, you reluctantly power up your computer, and accept that you won’t get sleep tonight.
John Davidson, senior, said that while his senior year has been a bit easier than junior year, it’s still extremely time-consuming.
“I spend most of my time on school work,” Davidson said. “I’ve got a lot of AP classes, and then I just squeeze in [free time] where I can.”
Despite his challenging schedule, Davidson said he enjoys all the classes he’s taking. He said his main inspiration for pursuing selective colleges is his parents’ academic background as Northwestern University alums.
“It’s [mostly from] the culture I [grew] up in,” Davidson said. “[I’ve always had] tons of books sitting around my house, and [my family] tends to talk about science and various academic things.”
Emma Maric, senior, said her interest in academics is fairly self- motivated, but is also heavily inspired by her family dynamic.
As a first generation U.S. college student, Maric said she wants to have every opportunity to pursue higher education.
“My mom’s from Germany and my dad’s from Bosnia, so I’m the first one out of my [immediate] family who’s really applying to colleges [in the U.S.],” Maric said. “It’s been a little more stressful because of that, but I’ve done a lot of research.”
Maric said she is not attached to any one specific school, since at the end of the day it’s impossible to predict which schools will accept you, especially if you’re considering top academic institutions. Because of this, she said she cast a wide net of schools with varying degrees of selectivity, but that it led to a very stressful admissions process.
“I submitted 17 applications by the early action deadline while running cross country and taking five AP classes, which was kind of a lot,” Maric said. “I don’t really know how I did that.”
In addition to their rigorous course load, both Maric and Davidson are involved in multiple extracurricular activities. Maric is captain of the varsity girls’ cross country team, a member of NHS and volunteers for Girls on the Run events, while Davidson said he is involved in multiple STEM-based clubs at KHS, and experiments with metalworking. Abby Peterson, college counselor, said she recommends having a strong list of extracurriculars, but that if you are participating in countless activities solely to strengthen your resume, she suggests a different approach: quality over quantity.
“Universities want to see a lengthy commitment [to extracurriculars],” Peterson said. “The longer [students] are [involved], the more leadership roles and responsibilities they [gain]. This tells a university the likelihood of them [continuing that activity] within their population. However, at the end of the day it’s not about more; it’s about your passions.”
According to Peterson, this frame of mind is especially important when applying to competitive schools. Even if you carefully tailor your activities list to the ones most appealing to colleges, Peterson said it might not make a difference. According to Peterson, students are often accepted or rejected to Ivy Leagues not because they aren’t qualified academically, but because selective schools intentionally pull from a wide range of geographical areas, searching for different types of students, athletes or majors to bring a variety of people to their campus.
Due to this, Peterson advises students to choose most of their activities based on their passions and not simply build impressive looking resumes, and to research less selective schools that still pertain to their true interests.
“The work is in finding those schools and what you can find within them [that makes you] excited about going,” Peterson said. “[The goal is that] you feel like you’re going to be challenged, and be happy and proud to go there.”
For juniors, beginning to think about the college path, both Maric and Davidson said the best thing you can do to prepare is to stay organized. College admissions might be overwhelming at first, but Davidson said it’s much easier if you break it down.
“Just go through it step by step,” Davidson said. “Also start everything as early as you can. You don’t want to leave [everything] to the last minute, or even the last month.”
