How can I improve
Hi, I'm a high school Junior and I need help figuring out what I should do to get accepted into my choice college.
1. I don't have a job and I don't do many extracurricular activities besides NHS and my school's Random Acts of Kindness club (an interest club in which I'm the Sec).
2. As of this year so far my 4.0 Weighted Cumulative GPA is 3.9890 (as of MP2 unweighted GPA is 3.6625). My 10th-grade WCGPA was 4.0093 and in 9th grade was 3.9700.
3. I am taking two AP classes (APUSH and AP LANG) and one honor (Honors Chem), and plan on taking 3 AP next year.
How can I improve my grades/activities to improve my chances of getting into a top-tier university of my choosing? (i.e UPENN, University of Maryland College Park, etc.) Need help!
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2 answers
Part Time Job
Independent Research Project (there are many students journals that could get your work published) - this is a great EC on your resume.
Internships at non-profits
Try volunteering more (50-100 hr or more)
Apply for President or Vice-President role in your interest club.
Apply for officer roles at NHS
Apply for officer roles at other clubs.
As Jasmine suggested: Tutoring
Start your own club
Shadow professionals in your field of interest.
You can start your own project and try to make a large scale impact (this can be anything like starting your own non profit or business)
Starting a sport at this point of time would be pointless since you don't have much time to advance in team levels or participate in many compeitions.
Other than that most of these can be done during the summer or you can start right now. You have plenty of time to work through your extracurriculars if you stay resilient and work hard so don't be too stressed out.
Try to increase your GPA to at least a 3.8 or 3.9
Taking AP courses and getting bad grades isn't a good look, so you'll need to maintain good grades in those classes if you want a GPA boost and showcase capability of handling the rigor.
If you struggle with AP courses, then try to review the topics before hand during the summer through free online courses or youtube videos (you can find the curriculum on college board.
I think your course rigor is fine as long as you maintain a good GPA and score 4s and 5s on your AP Exams.
Good luck and prioritize your health too!!
Taking AP courses is not necessarily a good idea for your unweighted GPA, however your weighted GPA will benefit. I recommend you take AP courses you know you will excel in, such as courses you're highly interested in. Colleges look more at course rigor than GPA, so taking AP courses is great for college admissions. To raise your unweighted GPA, you will need to get mostly As this year. To do that, attend tutoring sessions and do some self-tutoring since you have a lot of extra time on your hands from a lack of ECs. If you are interested in adding a few more ECs to your resume, maybe join a sport or another interest club in which you can gain a leadership role.
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what do you suggest if starting another ec is difficult for me? Due to my family situation, I wasn't able to do any EC's until this year, and the time I can spend after school is already limited so trying to get into another ec will be difficult.