Crafting your college application properly

   Okay, so chances are, if you're in high school, something that you must really focus on is the idea of preparing for college, assuming that you are continuing on your academic journey. And specifically in the US, to build your college application isn't something that's straightforward and that easy, because in the US, if you are trying to attend a college you have to meet a lot of requirements, and you have to do a lot of stuff - that means that you have to do more than having a good score in your SAT or a good score at school; because colleges, especially top colleges, require you and expect you to be a well-rounded person: to be one who not only focus on the academic aspect, but on other things as well, for example, extracurriculars or volunteering or doing research and things like that. And in recent years, college has been more competitive than ever, with a lot of students, even internationally, wanting to join a top-100 college in the US, and they try to do a lot of things. And while we, as a person can certainly get into these high-ranked colleges, without careful planning and knowing how to build our application, it can be very tricky, when a lot of students have very amazing backgrounds and they really have very crazy extracurriculars. Therefore, knowing how to prepare for your college application and knowing how to stand out from other people are crucial things that you need to be able to do if you want to have a good spot in the college. And what I mean by that is that you can get into a good college (certainly!) If you're able to know how to work the application out in an efficient way, the colleges can be amazed by your talents, amazed by your abilities, amazed by your achievements, and give you a spot at some of the best colleges in the world.

   Okay, so before we actually start anything, the most important thing that you need to know is that you need to start your college application early. Some people may say that you should start your college application when you're in the 11th grade, however if you're not caring about what colleges are you planning to attend and what requirements are needed until, for example, 11th grade then you are going to fall behind compared to other people. So why is this the case? For example, in the extracurricular section where you have space to fill in (at max) 10 different extracurriculars, the thing that students want to do to stand out to colleges is that they have consistency, that they have done these things by spending so much time over a long period of time. This is because, for example, for a college to see two students, one of them, they do something but only for short amount of time, compared to another person who does the same thing over the course of four years from 9th to 12th grade, the student who have done the thing over a longer period of time will of course stand out, because they have consistency, they have passion for this certain extracurricular. Because of this, please start early, because the sooner you're able to understand what colleges around the world, especially in the US,requires you, you will be able to understand what should you do over the course of the four years of your high school so that it meets the requirements and the criteria of the colleges, so that you can have a higher likelihood of grabbing yourself a spot at one of the best colleges in the world.

   So apart from understanding the college application process as well as reaching out from your friends or your schools or counselors for support, something that is a very good practice for us is to think about safety, target and reach schools. So essentially, for colleges, you can separate them (according to their ability) into three types, which are safety, target, and reach schools. For safety schools, these are schools that you have a high chance of getting in. For target schools, these are schools that can be in your ability and that if you work hard enough you will have a fair likelihood of getting into it. Finally, for reach schools, these schools are pretty much “on top”, and that you have a lower likelihood of getting into these colleges. So the thing that many students do is that when they are applying to colleges in the US, they send the applications to around 7-9 colleges: 4 for the safety schools, two to three for target schools and around two schools for the reach school. This way, you can still challenge yourself with the reach schools while also leaving yourself some safe options in case you get rejected from the colleges that are more on the target and reach schools side.