What 9th Grade Students Should Do to Get a Strong Start to the School Year

(This is an updated version of an article from 2021.)

Ninth graders: congratulations on your first year of high school! There’s a new stage of your academic journey ahead of you. While it may seem far too early, being fresh out of middle school, to be thinking about college, ninth grade is actually the perfect time to start laying the foundation for a rock-solid college application.

Start exploring your interests

Don’t worry: ninth graders don’t need to be stressed about standardized testing just yet, nor the actual application process. Instead, ninth grade is the perfect time to find out where their passions lie. Which class subjects capture their attention? Which club or extracurricular activity gets them excited? Do they have aspirations, and in what ways have they expressed fulfilling them? Ninth grade can be a fresh start to try something new as well!

There are many ways that students can explore their interests (and maybe even reinvent themselves). Here are just a few:

Clubs and Activities

Ninth graders should check out which clubs or teams are available at their school – and if there’s a niche club they want to pursue that doesn’t exist quite yet, they can even form their club! Extracurriculars are great places for students to explore interests they can’t in the classroom, and now that ninth graders have entered high school, a wealth of interesting extracurriculars should be newly accessible to them.

Most high schools host club chapters of nationwide student organizations, such as DECA (business and marketing), Interact Club (volunteering and community service), and the National Science Bowl (STEM team competition), just to name a few. However, smaller-scale clubs can be just as valuable to your ninth grader. Their school’s culture club, robotics club, or book club may be options of interest. There are also clubs that offer workshops or events open to the general student body, which can provide students the opportunity to dabble in the activity before deciding to invest time in club membership.

Clubs aren’t the only way to expand extracurricular horizons, either. Ninth graders should feel free to look outside of school as well, from joining programs outside of school to pursuing personal hobbies at home. Learn to code, pick up an instrument, write a blog, experiment with art and graphic design—wherever your student’s extracurricular search takes them, they’ll be discovering more about the opportunities available to them, as well as more about themselves, the activities that captivate them, and the activities that don’t.

Online Classes

In ninth grade, the high school curriculum may not be as flexible as you or your student may like it to be. If there is a subject your student is interested in trying, but isn’t available to your student given their school’s offerings or the constraints of their course schedule, online classes are a strong solution! Many online learning options are available, including platforms like ASU’s Study Hall—through which your student can even earn college credit—among others.

What kind of subjects should ninth graders take online, then? Maybe there’s a foreign language that your student thinks would be cool to learn—no matter how niche the language, chances are there’s an online course for that. Maybe you want to see what it’s like to study a more specialized discipline, such as graphic design, psychology, or law. For situations like this, the internet can prove a solid resource.

Start to think (but not stress) about testing

Standardized testing is still on the admissions landscape, and—even if many schools are moving to test-optional policies—your student is still recommended to take the SAT or ACT, as the future of standardized testing in college admissions is still uncertain. Therefore, your student should give some thought to how testing will fit into their high school plans.

What are test-optional policies, actually? Here are some different ways in which colleges are considering (and not considering) test scores in their application policies:

• Test-required: Applicants must submit test scores as part of their application, and they will be considered.

• Examples of test-required schools (as of Oct. 2023): Georgetown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Test-optional: Applicants can decide whether or not they want to send their test scores. If an applicant sends scores, the scores will be considered. If an applicant doesn’t send scores, the scores won’t be considered. Important: choosing not to submit scores at a test-optional college does NOT count against applicants!

• Examples of test-optional schools (as of Oct. 2023): Columbia University, Boston University

• Test-free/test-blind: Applicants may not submit scores. Even if an applicant attempts to submit scores, their scores will not be considered. 

• Examples of test-free/test-blind schools (as of Oct. 2023): the University of California system, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Whatever decision your student makes regarding standardized testing, it’s important to not fear the test. The test is only one metric of your student’s academic achievement, and one of many, many (arguably more persuasive!) ones—and clearly, colleges with test-optional and test-free policies strongly agree. A less-than-ideal test score is far from something that will dash your student’s hopes of attending their dream college.

Read, read, read

One of the most important things a ninth grader can do at this stage is to read. Reading expands the mind, introduces readers to new perspectives, and can go a long way in growing your student’s vocabulary and understanding of new concepts as well!

What should students read? Anything. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, news articles, blog articles—even graphic novels (though not necessarily the most effective choice) can benefit your student. Reading actively engages people, allowing them to absorb the narrative at their own pace, and is probably one of the best ways a student can “explore” without even having to leave their room! 

Reading also, incidentally, helps students’ SAT test skills in many ways—and not only in the Writing & Language section. Reading helps students comprehend math problems as well, enabling students to more adeptly understand what a question is asking and jot down the relevant equation to calculate the answer.

Not only will reading a lot help your student write a better and more eloquent college application essay, but it will make your student a deeper thinker overall: one who can get so much more out of the college experience.

The key is honest self-evaluation

Now, the most crucial aspect of your ninth grader’s strong start this school year: your student’s self-evaluation and feedback. Running around and exploring all of these different interests and subjects is all well and good, but now your student needs to pause and evaluate their thoughts on their new experiences. 

Move beyond simple conclusions such as “that club was fun,” “this extracurricular was boring,” “the tasks were too hard,” or “I liked it at first, but not anymore.” Those are all fine conclusions to have, but successful self-evaluation goes beyond that and asks one key question: “Why?”

Which activities in particular have your student excited for more? What is it about those things that your student enjoys, and what motivates them to keep pursuing them? Is the student interested in this subject all the time, or only in certain environments or social settings? Which activities instead have your student internally dreading the thought of attending another meeting, and why do they fail to crucially keep your student’s interest? 

Sometimes, certain activities just don’t resonate with your student, and that’s perfectly fair. However, when they’re undergoing this self-evaluation process, it’s important for your student to try and get at the heart of the matter. Instead of concluding, “I think programming just isn’t for me,” your student should think about exactly why they feel that it isn’t suited for them. Is it because they prefer more physical, hands-on activities? Maybe they would rather be brainstorming ideas for the robot or handling the electronics than writing out the code. Then, using that information, what are other activities that incorporate specific aspects that your student did enjoy from their previous activities? These specifics are key pieces of information that will help your student not only discover more about what exactly it is that they enjoy, but also how they operate and think as a person.

Your student’s self-evaluations can only be effective, however, if parents participate in student feedback by taking their students’ conclusions seriously. If a student expresses hesitance in continuing a field of interest, take it as a signal to pivot away and pursue new things, rather than pressuring your student to keep doing something they’ve lost heart in doing. It’s okay for your student to change tracks often at this stage; the goal right now is to explore, after all. The best course of action is to encourage your student to follow their shifting interests, and to support them as they evaluate what they do and don’t like about each interest at every step!

As always, the advice we offer here mirrors the advice we give to our own students, but if you would like to see how we can customize advice for your student’s specific interests and needs, please feel free to request a free consultation.