College applications for many students are both a time of excitement and confusion for many. The choices you make during this time period can have large impacts on the schools you get into and the school where you ultimately end up. In this article, we will explain the significance of applying for college and help high school students navigate through college applications.

Throughout high school, maintaining a high GPA and taking challenging classes is the foundation to any good college application. You cannot make significant changes to GPA later on in high school, so it is important to always be consistent.

Also, building up your volunteer hours throughout high school makes it so you don’t have to cram Junior or Senior year.

Throughout all of high school, being involved in clubs, sports, and extracurricular activities makes it clear to any college that you care and are involved with the school.

The first thing to do in the path to applying to collages is taking the Pre-ACT and Pre-SAT sophomore year or early junior year to see what your best at. This is followed by taking the ACT or SAT junior year; you may need to take it multiple times if necessary.

The next step is to visit or research colleges sophomore to junior year to make a list of schools you want to apply to and some possible majors.

The summer going into senior year, you should start your essay using the prompts provided by the Common App.

The best way to go about applying to colleges is through the Common App. Using the app, it is easy to apply to multiple colleges at once, which is quicker than individual applications.

Joey English and Addie Baird tell us more about their collage application experience and tips they have for sophomores and juniors

Joey English, a senior at WKHS, said “I applied to about six or seven colleges but I ended up choosing OSU.”  Applying to a lot of colleges means that you have more options to choose from when you get accepted or denied.

Another detail is that Joey submitted his 33 ACT in his application. Though many colleges are still test-optional following Covid-19, there are typically more advantages for students when they do apply with test scores.

Joey also added that “my biggest tip for any juniors would be to volunteer because it will help your application so much because the college will see how you are involved outside of school.” It is easy to find local organizations like food pantries or youth sports coaching to work with.

Joey personally worked with “nursing homes” and “interacted with residents.”

The other interviewee, Addie Baird, is also a senior at WKHS. She is going to attend “either Miami or Tennessee.”

Addie said that “I applied to 12 colleges because I didn’t know where I wanted to go.”

“When applying to colleges, I did not submit my ACT or SAT because I felt like they weren’t as important as they once were.”

Addies last piece of advice was to “start your application process as early as possible to give yourself time to generate ideas.”

Even though Addie and Joey had different ideas, there are many useful strategies that can be implemented in the college application process.