College Planning Guide

College planning should start from the ninth grade or even earlier in middle school to make sure you are on the right track for college, especially if you are aiming for selective colleges and universities. This guide provides bi-monthly to-do lists to help you navigate the college planning process that culminates into college application in your senior year. College planning and application involves much more than just getting good grades, filling out forms, and writing essays. The process--strenuous and personal--requires a great deal of exploration, reflection, and initiative to identify your interests and strengths and, ultimately, bring out the best of you.

How to Use This Guide

Students and parents can use this guide as a starting point to create individualized plans according to your own strengths and interests. For example, this guide includes summer planning and application in each grade. What types of activities and programs you should take on in summer depends on your interests and level of preparation. A great deal of consideration should also go into the sequence of taking certain types of activities in each summer of high school, starting from the summer before the ninth grade. The same goes for extracurricular activities and leadership engagement. To customize your college planning, parents and students should utilize the rich resources on our blog with featured articles on finding your passion, applying for precollege summer programs, engaging in internships, and pursuing academic interests in computer science, business and entrepreneurship, psychology, math, science and engineering, English and writing.