11th Grade
The Road to College Admissions
Lost for where to start your journey to attending college? Wondering if you’re way behind your peers? Confused about what step comes next?
January 6, 2021
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Lost for where to start your journey to attending college? Wondering if you’re way behind your peers? Confused about what step comes next?
Applying to college isn’t just a matter of figuring out how or where or why! There’s also when. Don’t let a college applications calendar scare you.
You may be asking yourself, “The waitlist? My student is a junior! Why would I worry about the waitlist?”
While your application season is still months away, that doesn’t mean your college prep should wait until then. In this article, I’ll discuss the specific reasons why thinking about the waitlist when you student is in 11th grade instead of 12th grade can help you through the process.
We’ve all had the experience of being nervous before a test, but sometimes the stress and anxiety can start to interfere with your performance on the test itself. This is called test anxiety (see part one of this post for more information on what test anxiety is and some preliminary ways to overcome it). Luckily, there are plenty of concrete ways to get over test anxiety and help you stay calm during the many important standardized tests you’ll take junior year!
Junior year is full of standardized tests—SATs, ACTs, SAT IIs, APs—but whatever the acronym, even the thought of sitting for hours filling in tiny scantron bubbles with a number two pencil can be enough to make your palms sweat.
Taking the SAT exam can be a self-esteem crushing, nerve-wracking part of the college admissions process. It’s definitely not designed to be a walk in the park, and consists of three math, reading, and writing sections, approximately a four hour interval to complete these sections, and a score posted online that can seem like the end of the world.
I got lucky. When I went to U.C. Santa Cruz, I thought it would be the worst. I really wanted to be at the ever-prestigious and renowned U.C. Berkeley, and even with a high SAT score, my relatively low GPA wasn’t enough to cut it.
If you were like me in class, you preferred to observe. You liked to take in your environment and soak in all the details. When it was time for a class discussion, you preferred to listen rather than assert your opinion.
In high school, you move throughout your day from science to math to history class. Because you have several subjects in one day, it’s important to see they are all treated differently. Studying for science is different than studying for history or English.
Do you wish you were able to get a top score on every test? Some people can easily do well on standardized tests while others really struggle. If you do poorly on tests, there are strategies that can help.
