Should I aim for top colleges?

   As you come to high school, apart from enjoying life and being a little bit wild, something that you definitely should take into consideration in case you want to pursue higher education is to think about colleges - which colleges to choose, what requirements are needed in order to apply for these colleges, financial abilities, along with a lot of other factors. Continuing on with what we have left off in the previous post, where we have thought about the idea of being strategic when choosing colleges as well as to prepare for your college application, today, we are going to look at something that I think you may ask yourself. And that is: should I aim for top schools? I believe that the path that you are going to take in high school is strongly influenced by whether your want to aim for a top college (for example, the Ivy League), since when you have been committed to getting into a top school - ideally, this choice should have been made earlier on in high school - you are going to work very hard for this goal, even if the chance of getting into these schools are, unfortunately, very unlikely. Because of this, if you are still questioning yourself whether to pursue these colleges or not, this post is surely going to be a very helpful guide for you, so please read this carefully!

   The first thing that you need to do is that you have to evaluate your purposes for aiming for top colleges, as well as applying for colleges in general. If you are a person who wants to have a high education level and emphasize on the importance of education as an important for your life later on, then colleges are going to be a thing that you definitely should join. Otherwise, if you are not that interested in studying, or that the pathway you are taking can make you successful without the need of a very high level of education, then you shouldn’t force yourself to attend a higher education - whereas it is certainly going to be helpful for you later on, college does cost a lot, and plus if you are not choosing the education pathway then it will probably be a waste of time for you. And if you are leaning on the path of emphasizing the importance of getting a higher education level, evaluate your purpose for aiming for top colleges - what are you trying to gain from when you are attending top colleges? Is this solely because you want the fame of getting into a top college, or is it more than that - for example, since you believe this particular college has a major that is the best in the world? If you really want to get a good degree because it will serve you a specific purpose later on in life, then definitely aim for these top colleges. On the other hand, if your purpose is only so that you can have a degree so that you can get a job, then you shouldn’t pressure yourself to get into a very top college. Please note that this is only my perspective on this issue - I am not saying that I am discouraging people from wanting to get into top schools (it’s wonderful if you manage to do so!) but at the end of the day, it’s more about the “why” than just the tag of being enrolled in a good college, you know?

   The next thing that you need to consider is whether you can endure the pressure that you have to put on yourself if you want to have a shot of getting into these colleges. Please be aware that it is not just luck of whether you are going to be accepted into these prestigious colleges - you will have to dedicate yourself a lot to this process. There are many things that are parts of the typical college application, and if you want to be a competitive applicant then you must be able to do well in all of these sections (unless you are a gifted person on a particular aspect like sport or academics), including getting a good GPA (for the Ivy League, you definitely will need a 4.0 GPA), having good extracurricular activities (building a non-governmental organization, holding events, hosting clubs, etc.), doing volunteering, along with things like having great recommendation papers (which can be achieved by creating good relationships with your teachers). And this certainly will be a lot of pressure, hence you definitely will think about this if you want to aim for these top colleges.

   Lastly, look at your abilities and see if they are meeting the requirements of these top colleges. A helpful thing that I recommend you to do is that you can go on Youtube and look at videos of people getting into these colleges. In these kinds of videos, they will share things like GPA, quantity and quality of the AP courses that they take, along with what activities that they have done in their high school years. By looking at these videos, you can certainly compare them with yourself, and decide if you think you are capable of doing things like them.