S3E19: College Application Planning Tips for Juniors
Today's question of the week: "What should I do as a Junior to prepare for College applications?”
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Today's question of the week: “What should I do as a Junior to prepare for college applications?"
SHOW NOTES
Introduction: In this episode of the "Admittedly" podcast, host Thomas Caleel speaks directly to high school juniors and their parents, offering actionable insights on preparing for the college admissions process. With a focus on planning and strategy, Thomas emphasizes steps that students can take now to set themselves up for success next fall.
Summary of Key Points:
1. Planning and Academic Preparation: Thomas encourages juniors to think ahead by working backward from their goals, even if those goals are not yet fully defined. He discusses the importance of building a strong academic profile by taking challenging courses in areas related to intended college majors, understanding academic strengths and weaknesses, and developing relationships with teachers for future recommendations.
2. Strategic Testing Preparation: Juniors should begin preparing for standardized tests, selecting either the SAT or ACT based on practice test performance and comfort with the format. Thomas highlights the importance of consistent study, understanding test structures, and being strategic about test dates to achieve the best possible scores.
3. Extracurricular Depth and Leadership: Thomas stresses the value of focusing on a few meaningful extracurricular activities, preferably with leadership roles or community engagement beyond school clubs. Genuine commitment and demonstrated impact, rather than superficial "passion projects," are key to standing out in the admissions process.
4. Planning for Summer and Building on Experience: With summer approaching, Thomas suggests seeking meaningful internships, selective programs, or impactful work experiences. Avoiding pay-to-play programs, juniors should focus on intentional, resume-building activities that reflect genuine interests and make a difference in their communities.
Conclusion: Thomas urges juniors to start planning now for their own admissions journey, emphasizing the importance of intentionality and self-reflection. By strategically preparing academically, investing in meaningful extracurriculars, and building strong test scores, students can put their best foot forward when the time comes. Follow @admittedlyco on Instagram and TikTok for ongoing tips and guidance throughout the college admissions process.
Have your own question you want answered? Leave us a comment on social media @admittedlypodcast for a chance to be featured.
About Thomas Caleel:
Thomas is an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania. After earning his MBA at the Wharton School of Business in 2003, he moved to Silicon Valley. For three years, he was Director of MBA Admissions and Financial Aid at Wharton. He worked closely with admissions professionals, students, alumni, and professors to curate the best possible MBA class. Thomas has been an entrepreneur his entire life in the fields of finance, agriculture, wellness, and sporting goods. As the founder of Global Education Opportunities LLC, he works as a high-level admissions advisor to help families and students achieve their education goals. Thomas started the podcast Admittedly because he is passionate about demystifying the application process for all parents and applicants.
Related Links
Apply to be a guest: www.thomascaleel.com/apply-for-podcast
Follow Admittedly on Social Media
TikTok: @admittedlypodcast
Instagram: @admittedlypodcast
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Hello, and welcome to the Admittedly podcast. I'm your host, Thomas Caleel, and today I'm talking to high school juniors and their parents. It's been a hot minute since I've done a long-form podcast, and it's really nice to be back here. Just have a chance to talk to you outside of the social media channels. Certainly, I hope you've been following me at @admittedlyco on Instagram and TikTok. It's a great place for us to engage, for you to ask your questions, get in the comments, get in the DMs. I try to answer all those myself, so if you have questions, that's a great place for me to see them.
But let's talk about juniors, right? Because what's been happening for you the last few months? You're watching the seniors lose their minds, right? You saw this rush up to the November 1 deadline. They're now all kind of twisting around for the UC application deadlines, and you're probably looking at that, and you're kind of seeing your fate, your future, laid out ahead of you. And so I want to talk about things that you can be doing now to prepare for your turn at bat next fall. It's very important because the more we plan ahead, the more we think ahead, the better our results are going to be.
If you've been following the podcast, if you follow me on social media, you'll know that I am relentlessly focused on planning ahead and strategy and really kind of stepping back and saying, "Okay, where do I want to go? How can I best get there, and what steps do I need to do now, right, to make that outcome a reality?" And you know that for me, I like to work backwards. So I look at the end goal, right? "I want to be a doctor," for example. But I don't want you to get too upset and worried about, like, "Oh, I don't know what I want to do for the rest of my life." You don't need to know what you want to do for the rest of your life. But let's be thoughtful, and let's think about, "Okay, what is it that interests me, and how do I plan to engage with that?" And then let's work backwards from that and say, "All right, I want to be a diplomat because I really believe in, you know, global politics, right, and the power of diplomacy."
So what we want to do is we want to work back. We say, "Okay, what do we need to do for that?" We need, let's say, a master’s, an MPA. How do we do that? Well, we go to a good school, go to a good undergraduate program. We study comparative government, we study political science, we study sociology—these things, right? Maybe we go to law school. And what we do is we work backwards from there, and then we say, "Okay, well, how do we get into that first part, which is university? What do we need to study to major in political science?"
And so, in high school, you know, we have a broad spectrum of classes we have to take, right? But we're really focusing, we're really dialing in on history, English, economics—things that line up with international relations, PPE, you know, sociology, these kinds of majors. And we really want to make sure, right? If you followed me, you know this: you're taking the hardest possible classes for those particular subjects, right? If you get an A minus in biology, okay, fine. Now, that might not be the right answer for somebody who's interested in going pre-med, but for you focused on going into political science or international relations, you might be able to get away with, like, an A minus in biology. But really, we want to be taking the hardest level available in history, English, economics, maybe statistics, and getting that A, right, preparing ourselves academically.
And so part of that is going to be self-awareness—self-awareness of strengths and weaknesses in our academic profile. So juniors, I want you going out and getting to know your teachers. Make the effort. Try and talk to them outside of class. Go to office hours if they have those available. If they don't, ask them, "Hey, can we grab coffee? Can I come see you in your office and talk about this reading or this concept that we're discussing?" Don’t just go to them when you don’t do well on a test or you get a B on a paper, right? Because then you have no relationship and you have no basis on which to kind of advocate to learn more or change your grade if that’s what you need to do, right?
This is also important because, again, we're thinking ahead to next fall, and we're preparing and planning and thinking about recommenders. Teachers who don’t know you don’t usually write the best recommendations, and they may know you in the class. They may say, "Boy, that Thomas, he's a real go-getter, and he really tries hard." But when they see you outside of class, they get to know a more three-dimensional view of you. And that comes very, very, very much into play as they’re trying to sort out, "Okay, are you in the top 2% of students I’ve ever taught? Top 5? 10? 20%?" Right? And those rankings, that positioning, matters to highly selective schools.
So we’re thinking ahead, not just, "How do I get a good grade? How do I learn more? How do I get to know my teachers better?" but, "How am I positioning myself for a good recommendation next fall?" Right? One of the things that we want to do too is make sure we’re in the right classes. So for those of you who might be able to change your schedule second semester, right, can you step up? Can you challenge yourself a little bit more? Sometimes you have an opportunity to take interesting classes.
For example, my son, where he goes to school, there’s an elective called forensics, and you get to study, like, CSI-style forensics, which really looks like an interesting course, right? So you can have some fun. You don’t have to have everything just be dialed in and, you know, "Oh, I'm just taking all these AP courses, grind, grind, grind." Yes, take challenging courses, yes, plan ahead to demonstrate your intellectual curiosity and academic rigor. But also, you can have some fun and talk about that.
I’ve also seen students take courses that are external to their high school, maybe through, like, the Berkeley UC Berkeley online courses or other online courses, and take those, get a good grade, really kind of show, "Hey, I’m deeply curious about this subject, and I took this class even though I didn’t need to because I wanted to challenge myself. And hey, by the way, got an A." Berkeley Extension is very well regarded, and that’s something where you should get college credit. We’ve talked sometimes where taking AP exams sometimes doesn’t get you the college credit that will. If you're an international student, you want to make sure that your academic rigor is clearly defined. If you're taking the IBs, that's great; if you're taking A-levels, great; if you're in a, let's say, public school, in a national curriculum, this is where you might want to step back and say, "Okay, yes, we have maybe national exams, but maybe what I want to do is study for, on my own, an AP exam or two or three that line up with my intended academic focus in college so that I can demonstrate mastery."
So, if we go back to the political science example, maybe you're taking AP English, maybe the AP History exam, right? This is important because it gives the readers a clearly defined, very, very, very objective view of your academic abilities. And when you take that together with the SAT or ACT, now we have this kind of firm underpinning of your academic ability. Great.
So what else do we need to do? Well, I think the next thing we're going to talk about is testing because I touched on testing. Hopefully, most of you have taken the PSAT. You've already gotten in the groove of studying. But if you are a junior right now, it's November, and you haven’t started preparing for the SAT or ACT, that’s not good, and I need you to get on that, okay? SAT and ACT—these are not intelligence tests, okay? These are exercises in discipline and pain management.
What do I mean by that? I mean you have to just keep working at it. You need to grind it out. You need to have the discipline. You need to put in half an hour a day, an hour a day. And I—believe me, I understand how limited your time is, right? But the schools want to see you can handle a rigorous load of responsibility. Why? Is it because they're mean and sadistic? No, it's because, in college, you're going to have a lot of competing things for your time. You're not going to have the structure of home and parents and all the great things that you have available to you as high schoolers. So they really need to understand that, look, you can balance this, you can do this.
All right, go into the SAT or ACT and do your work and prepare, all right? I can't say it any better way. You have to prepare. Now, what do I mean by "prepare"? Okay, if you can get a tutor, if you're not able to afford a tutor, use Khan Academy. There are so many free resources available on the internet. Don’t just try and plow through this thing on your own because it’s not efficient, right? Again, you have very limited time, and it's very important that you maximize that time. So take a practice SAT, take a practice ACT, figure out which exam you like more, which exam suits you better. In my experience, students resonate with one or the other. There is no right choice here; the universities don’t prefer one or the other. Find the one you like and just go, go, go, go, go. Don’t take both of them. I see students do this every year. It is a waste of time. It just doesn’t—it’s not necessary. You could be doing a lot more with the time you spend studying for that second exam. So pick one and just stay with it.
As you’re studying, look for areas of improvement. See where you are falling flat. Is your reading comprehension off? Is your math off? Spend time learning how the test works, right? So when you start test prep programs, there’s usually a couple of chapters in the beginning: how the test works, how it's graded, how to identify different problem types. And most students flip right through that, thinking, "Yeah, it’s a test. You look at the question, you solve it," except that these tests are designed in such a way that you can’t just brute-force your way through it, right? They’re designed to catch the students who sit there and are like, "I'm just going to solve every problem," because you don’t have time. So what you need to do is find a system, and there are many different systems for approaching these tests. You need to find the one that fits you. Do you back-solve? Do you do problem process of elimination? What is it that works for you? And then stay with it. Get the help you need. Form a study group, whatever it is, maximize your time so that you’re super efficient with the studying that you do.
Try and take an exam, you know, ideally, I would say around January, but if you just started studying now, maybe wait a little bit. You don’t want to be taking, like, six or seven tests, right? Because for some schools, like Georgetown, they're going to ask for all your tests. And if you're just banging your head against the wall, that’s not smart. Likewise, if you end up taking a test next September, right, and you don’t do your best on it, don’t just jump and take the October exam, unless you know something went wrong in September. If you're like, "Oh, I knew that, but I just—I don’t know what happened. I just had a brain cramp and it didn’t go well," then retake it. But if you took it and there was a fundamental disconnect, you just didn’t know part of it, it’s unlikely you’re going to teach yourself that in 30 days. So be strategic about how you lay out your test dates. If you can, I would suggest you book several dates, right? It’s not inexpensive, so, you know, definitely apply for fee waivers if you have to. But the exams fill up very quickly, and you don’t want to be in a position where you want to take an exam but there’s no space left.
For international students, this is also very important. Why? Because sometimes SAT or ACT will cancel scores for international students on an exam if they suspect that the exam questions were leaked or copied, and you don’t want to be stuck, you know, trying to cram in that last final test date and your scores get canceled. That’s not a position that you want to be in. Okay, same thing, by the way, goes for TOEFL/IELTS. Get ahead of that. Practice, practice, practice, practice. Get sharp. Get ready for it.
Okay, what should you be doing about your extracurricular activities? Well, ideally, now you've had, what, two years—freshman year, sophomore year—to kind of explore, see what you like to do, find those organizations that really resonate with you. And at this point, if you're in a classic extracurricular activity, by which I mean, like, the paper, an athletic team, a school club, you should be in what I call a junior leadership position, ideally, you know, Vice President, Secretary, or running a committee—something like that, kind of proving yourself up for senior leadership next year in your senior year.
If you've started a club—and this is very, very important—you can’t just start a club with a couple of your friends and say, "Hey, we got a club," right? Admissions officers are smart. They see that a mile away. And what you need to do is really make sure that (a) you're doing something meaningful, (b) that you have an actual system and a team in place—right, continuity—so that when you leave, the things that you’re doing are continued, that there’s another multiple generations of students behind you who are going to pick up the mantle and do it better than you did, carry on what you started, and do it even better. So make sure that you build those systems out, make sure that you can talk about them in your essays, and make sure that your extracurricular activities at this point are getting narrow. You should not be doing, like, 10 extracurricular activities right now. At this point, you've winnowed them down. You’ve had to make some hard choices after sophomore year. You’re like, "You know what? I really need to dig in and cull a few of these so I can really focus my attention and effort."
Because when a university is building a class, it's very important to realize, right, they’re looking for really interesting people who are passionate about what they do and who are doing cool things around it. And so if you're doing too many things, you're just kind of, like, shallow, touching the top of different things, and you really lack any depth. And it’s very, very rare they’re going to find a way to fit you into the class.
The other thing that I would say is, if you are only doing extracurricular activities available through your school, you know, probably not the best idea. You really want to try and find things outside of school that evidence your interest—academic interest, intellectual interest, whatever it is, right, personal interest. Because if you think about it this way, there are about, what, 20,000-ish high schools in the United States? That means there are 20,000 school paper editors, 20,000 cheer team captains, 20,000 soccer captains, right? I mean, the pool is very, very, very broad and very deep. And so if all you're doing is cooking with the same ingredients that everybody else is, look, every once in a while, somebody’s going to get that right, and they are going to get selected, of course. But the students I see that really excel and are really, really sought after by the highly selective schools are the ones who go out and create opportunities. They are working in a business, starting their own business, starting their own club, but really building it, developing it, adding depth to it, getting out there and doing things that they care about, trying to drive change, trying to raise awareness around a cause. Those are students who stand out in the admissions process.
And notice that I do not use the term "passion project." I hate the term passion project. You should be doing things that you are passionate about and that you care about, because that's something you’re going to want to spend time on. But if you’re doing it strictly for college, it's just not going to work, to be honest with you. Admissions officers see through that really quickly: "Oh, look, you started a website and you raised $300 or you raised $3,000." It's all great that you do that, and hopefully, you know, you make the donation, you get it done. But the reality is that it's not a meaningful engagement. It’s not something that's really driving change on a deep level. And so you just kind of get lumped into the, "Oh, yeah, started a thing, and, you know, parents kind of wrote them a check" kind of a thing.
So differentiate yourself. You can start a club, you can start a foundation and go out and raise money and do tie-ups with other organizations and get visibility and hustle, hustle, hustle, get on the local news, really kind of get the word out there. That's great. Go ahead and do that, right? There's a big difference between that and the, you know, very typical, stereotypical kind of passion project.
This also leads us on then to summer, right? This is your last summer. This is a critically important summer. So ideally, it's something where you have been kind of working towards this. You've been building up responsibility, you've been doing different things, and now you’re really—you're doing that internship you’ve been selected into, like SSP or one of the MIT summer programs, something prestigious like that. I would avoid, and I say this all the time, I would avoid the kind of pay-to-play summer programs at the big schools. I know, yes, it's on Yale's campus. And, you know, look, Global Young Scholars is a great program, but in and of itself, it’s just not enough.
So the question is, what else are you doing? What else are you doing with your time? And studying for your SAT or ACT and working on your applications is not nearly a sufficient answer to that question.
So there's an expectation that you will continue to study for your standardized tests if you need to, that you will work on your college applications on your own time, but that you are going to engage. And I say this over and over again: Look, if you are not in a position where you can do one of these summer programs—and keep in mind, there are a lot of scholarships available. The schools make a lot of scholarships available and sometimes will even fly you out to attend the program. There are some, like Stanford, that have several medical programs for low-income and/or first-generation students. Absolutely take advantage of that. That's a very different construct than somebody who's kind of paying for a spot at an Emory summer program, okay?
You can work. You can, you know, work. I view work experience as being tremendously helpful. Go work on a construction crew, right? Learn the value of hard work, see how hard it is to, you know, make a dollar and earn that. Do something with your money, save it, invest it. Make meaningful choices, intentional choices with it. If you have to contribute to the family, contribute to the family, but then talk about that in your essays, right? This is all valuable life experience.
I did get a question just today on, you know, what happens if I do my junior year summer and realize that's not what I wanted to do anymore, right? This happens more than you might think. So, a lot of students, for example, say, "I want to be a doctor. I want to be a doctor. I want to be a doctor. My mother is a doctor; I want to be a doctor. My mother's a surgeon; I want to be just like her." Okay, great. So they do bio, they do chem, they volunteer, they do this, they do that. They finally work their way into an internship opportunity—not a class internship, but like a volunteer internship type of opportunity—at the hospital. They see it up close and say, "That's not what I want to do at all. I think I love medicine, but I think I'm a lab person. I'm a bench scientist."
What you like and what you don't like are both equally valid. So being able to talk about, in an essay, "This is what I thought I wanted to do, and when I had this experience, I realized this is not what I wanted to do, but I wanted to do this instead. And it's because of this experience that I had that led me to take this slightly different path," that's completely fine, right? There are very few things in the admissions process that are black and white, good or bad, right? Decisions that you make, the way you make them, why you make them—that can all be explained, and that, right there, is the critical key to being successful in this process. That is where the admissions officer gets inside your essay, gets inside your mind, and thinks, "Oh, I see how they're thinking. I see why they made this decision—that's really interesting. I'd like to learn more." And you've got them, and they're reading, and they're getting deeper and more engaged with your application.
So, the last thing I want to talk about quickly is leadership. It's about trying to evidence leadership in any area of your life. Now, some of you might be individuals, right? You might do individual sports. You might do more individual things like hackathons and coding challenges and things like that, and you know, that's okay, right? You do want to think about, though, evidence of leadership—maybe in the classroom, right? Maybe on a class team or a class project. Not that you necessarily need to use a leadership anecdote or example, but if you are asked for one, you're going to need one. So prepare for that. Think about who you are as a leader. Think about the different types of leadership.
I talked today on my UC webinar about servant leadership, this concept of leading by supporting your team and enabling their success, versus standing up in front and yelling at them and, you know, saying, "Come on, we're going to go take this hill! Let's go, rah, rah, rah!" That is a particular style of leadership. But also, I think there’s, you know, leadership from the middle, leadership from the back, right? Quiet leadership, soft power leadership. So find the leadership style that works best for you. Maybe being captain of the football team might at times require you to be a more vocal, rah-rah leader, and at other times, a more servant leader, helping your team by doing what they need to enable their success together as a team, for example.
So, figure that out. Try and think about yourself as a leader, what that looks like, and how you see yourself in college or university—being a leader in whatever area, academic area, extracurricular area. You know, how are you bringing those skills to the university? Why? Because leaders go in and they do things. They make change happen. They make things happen. And universities are looking for students who can come in and say, "I want to make this better. I want to make the world around me better. I want to make my experience better for my fellow classmates, and I want to do really, really cool things."
I'll give you an example. I talked to a young man who was a Penn first-generation student; his parents had emigrated from China, and we were talking about politics, and he said, "I'm very, very interested in Asian American participation—or lack thereof—in politics." I was like, "Oh, great! Are you talking about, like, national politics? We have a big election coming up." He said, "No, no, I didn't even think about that." He said, "Local politics, because local politics are what affect us day in and day out." So, he does a tremendous amount of work in New York, in his local neighborhood, getting out voter registration, informing people about their rights, informing them about the importance of voting, informing them about the U.S. political system. I was like, "Oh, great. Have you brought that to Philadelphia?" And, you know, I really respected his answer. He was like, "No, I live in New York. I have relationships in New York. I am focused on New York because that's my community, and I am here to better my community." I respected that, right? Because most people say, "Oh, yeah, no. Well, then I got involved in Philly." And that's great, and you can certainly do that and be just as passionate about it, but it's okay to also be single-minded about things, and that was how he was leading change in his community.
So juniors, you have a lot to think about. Whether you like it or not, you are less than a year away from your own admissions journey. So, planning ahead now really, really matters. Please follow my Instagram, @admittedlyco, or TikTok. Please listen to my podcast. I'll be turning out a lot of content for you to help you think ahead, to help you be strategic, to help you plan. Because none of us, to my knowledge, has a time machine. I know some pretty smart students, and they probably will eventually be able to solve that, but at the moment, there's no time machine, so we cannot go back in time and fix mistakes. So think about how your actions now will resonate a year from now when you're making your own admissions and application decisions, and let that be your guide. Use my experience. Drop into my comments. Ask me questions. I love answering them, and I look forward to engaging with you.
Wish you all the best, and I look forward to this coming year of working together. Thank you.
