Senioritis: Four Things to Ponder

Welcome to your last year!  If you are normal, you will experience senioritis.  Don't feel guilty about being sick of your high school, because...... it is normal.  In my 15 years of teaching high school (most of them with seniors)  I have come to not be surprised nor offended by senioritis.

By Richard Phillip Rücker (Flickr: Waiting for Time to Pass) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The thing I try my best to communicate to my students is that the senior year is really important even though it doesn't feel like it.   You need to fight through the urge to shut down mentally.  Here's some quick points to ponder on this year:

1. If you will be applying for the military, you will need to score high on the ASVAB test.  Score too low and no military for you.  How do you do well on the test?  Keep Learning This Year!
2. If you will be attending a community college, you will usually need to take placement tests.  Score too low on this and you may have to take high school level remedial courses that do not count towards your degree. Ditto any vocational colleges or programs.
3. If you plan on going to a 4-year college, low grades this year could cost you your spot even after you have been accepted to college.   This is one reason colleges have waitlists.  You will also need to take those pesky placement tests.
4. If you plan on doing nothing, then you may expressing to your parents the intense desire to be kicked out of the house as soon as you turn 18.

So there you go.  Just let all that marinate in your head.  Learning is a lifelong thing, so it is best to settle in for the long haul.

9 Benefits of Advanced Placement Classes

Increased Weighted Grade Point Average: (for C and above grades.) Colleges and scholarships want to see a high Grade Point Average. Some college also want to see your unweighted GPA, so it is important to carefully choose your AP courses and not over-commit. AP does not affect your unweighted GPA.

Level of Difficulty:   Colleges and scholarships want to see that you are attempting the most challenging courses available


By Shenandoah University (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]


Priority Registration: Impacted programs often register students with more credits first. This ensures you get your classes and get out of school quicker.

Increased Knowledge and Skill Base:  AP courses are challenging. This increases your overall level of knowledge and skills. This decreases the burden of learning future material in high school and college. It is kind of like a genius snowball effect. You learn more, which frees you up to learn more.This is why smart kids do well in college. They are coming to the table with more knowledge and skills while others are working just to catch up. Writing skills often determine the likelihood of college graduation and AP will help to develop those skills.

When you know more you will also do better on the SAT/ACT college entrance tests. Colleges and scholarships often weight this as importantly as GPA.

College Credit for passed AP Tests:  You save up to $4000 savings per passed test! According to the survey of colleges by the College Board, the average private college tuition per year is $30,094. Add in an average housing and meal cost of $10,000 and that AP test is worth $4000! Public schools, scholarships, and living at home will lower this cost and therefore the savings, but it is still significant.

Earlier graduation. The longer it takes to graduate, the more likely you will drop out of college. Each passed AP test shortens the time it takes to graduate.

Get to work sooner and make more money. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the average starting salary for a degree holder is $44,259. That is how much you can have in hand when you graduate a year early. This will also give you a year’s seniority towards future promotion, raises, and retirement.

Avoid those super-huge 100 level courses. You will have done these in high school. These are often some of the most difficult classes to get because people are having to repeat those courses. 200-400 level courses are often much smaller and more intimate.

College Application Anxiety

The decisions that cost us the most anxiety are those that involve a lot of risk and where there are many variables to consider.  The stakes are high when choosing a college because it is a major jumping off point for the next phase of life.  

If you are not anxious at all then I’m seriously concerned that you are not taking this whole thing seriously.  People who have zero anxiety tend to be lazy on the application essays thereby insuring a denial.   I’m going to assume you are taking this seriously, or you wouldn’t be reading this.  To you I say, stop freaking out! Anxiety is normal, but you cannot let it get the best of you.   

Make your list of things to do and begin working on them.  After that no amount of worrying will really change anything.

I have great news for you!  You don’t have to make a final college choice just yet.  You should be looking to apply to seven colleges.  This means we just need to narrow it down by the beginning of the senior year.  That said we should put a lot of effort into this process because we are starting with over 3000 fully accredited colleges.

I need to repeat something I say a lot:  Most public universities have a wide range of majors that will give you most of what you want in a college.  I believe the perfect college does not exist and all colleges (as well as all organizations) have flaws.  There are quite a few colleges that are very good and will meet all your college needs.

How many colleges should you apply to?

You are looking for seven colleges to apply to.  You can do more, but it takes time to fill out the applications, do the essays, round up recommendation letters, and in addition to the time, each application requires an application fee ranging up to $70.  This means you are going to be limited to the number of colleges that you will be able to apply to.   

The object is to choose 2 colleges that are considered reach colleges, 3 colleges that are matches and 2 colleges that are safety colleges.  A safety college is a college where you will get in easily.  Your grades and test scores are far above the averages posted for that college.  Note:  these averages have been rising recently as more students have been chasing fewer freshman slots, so give yourself some wiggle room by going far above the averages posted for that school.  A match college is exactly as it sounds.  Your grades are about where the average scores are for that college.  A reach college is a college where you are slightly below the average scores for that college. Reach colleges are where we run into trouble.

Some people use the word dream college in place of reach college.  The reason I like the term reach college is that we are talking about a stretch, but not an unreachable chasm.  If you have a 3.1 GPA, then a reach college is one that has an average no greater than 3.5.  Do you see where I am going?  Some websites will delineate the percentages of students who have each level of grades.  

Collegeboard.org does a great job of this and in my opinion is the best place to get college data for score ranges. 

While  I was watching the swimming qualifiers for the 2012 Olympics.  One female swimmer who qualified was in the process of applying to colleges.  Listen, anyone who is good enough to qualify for the Olympics should have no problem getting a full-ride scholarship from a college.  After the race a commentator asked her if the colleges were leaving her alone.   She responded that they were being good.  I don’t know how good her grades are, and grades are important to colleges, but she will not need to score on the higher range of the academic scale.   

The low end of the range is often reserved for special status students.  This is important when thinking about applying to a reach college.  You must have something to offer them because your grades are not in the highest range of what they accept.  You should investigate which things each college values and apply to reach schools who value the type of experiences that you have.  In this way a reach college can become closer to a match college, and your chances for getting into that college increase.

Getting into College: Extracurriculars

I teach mostly freshmen and seniors.  I call those grades the bookends.  Freshmen are learning how to do high school academics, make new friends, and begin thinking about later on.  Seniors are totally different.  Since college applications are due by the end of November, then even the first semester grades of the senior year will not be available.  This means the initial judgment of college is based upon the 9-11 years.  In fact some colleges do not look at the freshmen year at all.  A senior who has messed around all high school has little options and they know it, because the kids who are applying for college are shoving it in their faces.

Image by Paul at Ft. Collins

Freshmen, the best thing you can realize is that the friends you have now are probably not the friends you will end up with at graduation.  Why is this? All people change over time, but there is no greater window of time that experiences more change than the high school years.  There is just something about high school that holds a lock on our hearts.  I’ve been out of high school for 23 years but nothing draws memories more than my high school years.  You are figuring out who you are and that requires experimentation.  I’m not talking about doing drugs and all, but I’m talking about those adjustments to our personality that comes during adolescence.  Researchers have determined that more brain development happens during adolescence than any other phase of life.  This is significant, so cut yourself a break.

A class discussion took a curve one day in my senior economics course.  We were nearing graduation and the kids were sharing that they had made really good friends in high school and didn’t want to lose them.  That piqued my interest so I asked them, “Who are your friends and where did you make these friendships?” What they shared has stuck with me and I now share with all my freshmen.  They shared that their closest friends were their teammates.  There are other renditions of this, such as band, theater, choir, and other clubs but the concept was the same. 

The things you do outside of the classroom will determine your friendships.  If you don’t get involved then you will have few authentic friendships and high school is going to be very lonely.  An authentic friend is someone you can talk to face to face and in person.  It is someone you can be open and honest with and not have to wear a mask.  They accept you for who you are and you do likewise for them.  It is a give and take relationship.  I’ve seen many of my better students neglect their friendships (as well as schoolwork) to focus solely on the person they are dating.  Once the breakup happens they find out that they have no one to lean on in their pain because their friends have moved on and made new friendships.

Colleges like to see involvement in sports, clubs, and community service because it shows that you are a well rounded person.  It also shows that you can manage time by juggling the responsibilities of homework, social life, as well as practice. There is something about slogging through a losing season and sticking with it that builds real character.  How about taking the time to teach a technique to a less skilled teammate, or having that tough one on one conversation with the coach because the rest of the team is afraid to say something?  All of these experiences make these activities very valuable.

As good as these experiences are, you should understand that to a college, your extracurricular activities are a very, very small portion of what colleges are looking for.  In fact some colleges are very upfront by saying the only thing they look at are grades and college entrance exams.  

Community service is work that is performed without pay where you make a contribution to the community in which you live.  Community service allows you the opportunity to help others and feel a part of something much bigger than yourself.  Many students have found their calling by doing community service.  It is a great way to learn about your strengths and weaknesses.  There is something about helping a person, it makes you care for them.  As you do more community service, you will begin to care more for others.  This will make you into a better person.  Another benefit of community service is that you will gain a better understanding of the basic working of life and how things work.

While there are many things you can do, my suggestion is to view it like a buffet.  In a buffet, you try a little of this and that and then you go back for the stuff you really like.  Going alone to do community service can be intimidating, so go with friends and you will have more fun.  Think about the things you care about the most.  What around you needs improving?  Then go find others who are already doing good things to help in that area.  If you are feeling innovative, organize it yourself.  There is a cool website to check out called Dosomething.org.  They have lots of ideas, events to join.  They will even fund your organization if you submit a good plan to them.

Private scholarships heavily lean on community service, so while the community service may not get you into a college, it may help you to pay for it.  The goal is to find something you are passionate about and put lots of time into one or two things.  Summers are made for fun and relaxing, but they are a great time to rack up community service hours.

Many colleges look very favorably on community service, but even colleges that have a comprehensive review of the whole set of experiences of a prospective student still rate grades and entrance exams as the highest factor of consideration.