What 11th Grade Students Should Do to Get Off to a Good Start

For many high school students, fall semester has already started, Granted, school may look and feel different for many students this year, but over the next few weeks, we’ll be highlighting some steps that high school students should be taking to prepare themselves for a strong start to the school year, as well as ways that students can set themselves up for strong admissions results in their senior year. The topics we discuss here are advice and steps we use to plan with our students, and if you’d like to see how we can tailor a specific plan for your student, feel free to request a free consultation. 

Standardized Testing

First, let’s address the elephant in the room for juniors. What should you do to plan for standardized tests? It’s near impossible to find a place to take it now, and even if you can register for a test, they are constantly getting cancelled!

As of September 2020, testing locations and schedules are still in flux. If you are a junior, we do not recommend trying to get a spot this fall. It would be too much work to prep for two or three months only to realize the December test is cancelled. Plus, you still have spring 2021 to take any necessary tests. It’s a good idea to book a spot for February or later for the SAT I or ACT, but know that those may not pan out either. While we hope that students will be able to take exams, at the same time, know that many colleges understand the current  situation and have adopted test optional or test blind policies. 

Courses

Given you might still have some leniency with course schedules and deadlines, you might be wondering what are the final few changes I can make to my course load to help my applications. With the inconsistent pass/fail grades and lack of test scores, surely admissions officers will be scrutinizing my GPA more right?

Yes, and no. It’s not as if the admissions reader will want you to have a much higher GPA or class rank to make up for your lack of an ACT or SAT score. That said, because there are fewer academic factors to consider as compared to previous years, your choice of coursework WILL affect how college admissions assesses your ability to handle academics in college. Admissions officers want to see you take rigorous courses, but they don’t want you to go overboard and take 10 APs; a Pepperdine admissions officer used the term “rigor with reason.” 

In other words, is your 11th grade course load more rigorous compared to your 10th and 9th grade courses? And are you taking advantage of the resources available at your school? For example, if you’re looking at studying chemistry in college and the school offers AP Chemistry, it might be a good idea to take it; if not, see if your local community college offers a chemistry course. Cross enrollment might boost your GPA and give you college credit. 

The key here is to communicate to the colleges that you are ready for a college-level course load. Junior year gives you many opportunities to demonstrate your readiness because  you might have more AP courses open to you at your high school or community college classes that you can enroll in. 

Extracurriculars and Third Party Validation

Juniors, congratulations on passing the halfway mark for high school! Hopefully, these past few years have been a time of growth, and you’ve been able to explore your interests with the courses you have taken, the clubs you’ve been able to join at school, and the extracurricular activities you’ve been able to engage in. Now in 11th grade, we want to take these activities to the next level. 

The term our ILUMIN consultants use for 11th grade is “third-party validation.” You may not have heard of this term before, and if you have, it may have been used in the context of business or product testing. Third-party validation means that a company will test a new product or service with a third party before going to the open market, in hopes that the third party will validate the strength, qualities, or appeal of the product or service. Usually, third-party validation can mean that a product or service is well-tested and can lead to great reviews or high praise. An example in our everyday world are Yelp or Google reviews; these days, it is rare to go into a new restaurant without going on Yelp or Google reviews to see how others thought about the food. 

At ILUMIN, we use the term “third-party validation” as a way to help students understand how to stand out in the admissions process. Admissions readers may have five, or as few as three, minutes to quickly understand the caliber of the student’s profile in front of them. Test scores and GPA is important here, but having third-party validations listed on your resume is important as well. 

Let’s consider an admissions reader comparing two students interested in majoring in CS. Candidate A’s resume cites AP Computer Science as his leading driver for studying CS; Candidate B cites that he built an app with over 1000 downloads that helped the food insecure track food banks in his county. Which student profile are you more intrigued about and would want to spend more time reading?

Hopefully you answered candidate B--and many admissions readers would agree with you! APCS is great, but to stand out as a top applicant, students need to have more on their application, especially on their resume section, where they can highlight activities, accomplishments, and impact. Candidate B’s example above was a third-party validation. It communicates to the reader that 1) the student programmed an application, 2) he or she was able to get it published online, 3) the application got over 1000 downloads, and 4) he or she was able to impact a group of people, in this example, the food insecure. Candidate B was able to communicate all four of these points in just a sentence or so on his or her resume. The power of third-party validation is that it quickly communicates a student’s skill, talents, or abilities. This way, your resume is vouching for you instead of you needing to explain why a particular activity is important. 

How do I get Third-Party Validations?

Now that we know what our goals are for this year, the next question is how. How do I get these third-party validations? What truly constitutes a third-party validation?

There are two factors when considering third-party validations--reputation and scale of impact. The point of a third-party validation is to communicate skills and talents quickly. Therefore, an internship at a lab under a professor at Stanford is going to stand out more compared to a personal project; that said, if you are able to win a local science fair with that personal project or you were able to utilize your findings to develop a solution that others could use, the scale of impact becomes greater. This is not to say that one example is necessarily better than the other, as both of these would be great examples of third-party validation. 

Here are some common examples of third-party validations that may work for you:

• Leadership (President, Treasurer, Secretary of a school club or outside activity)Since these positions are usually elected or appointed by others higher-up, a leadership position can show that others have great trust in your ability to lead and expertise in the subject matter.

• Awards / Competitions (Science fairs, USACO, AMIE) Winning competitions or scoring highly in one can communicate to a reader your skill level very quickly. For example, USACO (USA Computing Olympiad) Gold usually means that the student is within the top 10% of competitors for USACO.

• Internships / Jobs (Research at a university, shadow opportunities)These experiences show that a student’s talents are at a level such that a company or organization is interested in adding those talents to their team. 

Granted, some of these positions will be easier or harder to secure because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. If you’re interested in a selective summer program for a research or internship position, pay attention this winter to which summer programs are accepting applicants, as many have not made announcements yet. Here are some options that may interest you for fall 2020:

• Quarantutors is a free online tutoring service that is actively recruiting high school students to teach K - 12 students. Apply to be a tutor for calculus, chemistry, creative writing, foreign language, and more here! We recommend this program for students interested in leadership and teaching students.
  

• InspiritAI is a pre-college program created by Stanford alumni and graduate students. They’ve opened up registration for Fall 2020; no prior programming knowledge is required to start! We recommend this program for students interested in computer science competitions and projects.
  

• Polygence is an online academy that matches high school students with mentors in undergraduate and graduate studies to create a research project. Subjects include computer science, politics, fine arts, architecture, and law! We recommend this program for students interested in research. 

If you want some more suggestions or want to chat more in-depth about what third-party validation can look like for you, feel free to request a free consultation with us!