High School

Freshman Year: Understanding How Grade Point Averages Work
At the end of the first semester, grades are reported and report cards are sent home. Here's the way it works at a typical high school: Students get quarter grades and semester grades. Quarter grades are tabulated and sent home, but it's the semester grades that count. Once you get a semester grade on your record, it stays on your transcript. Semester grades are used to calculate your GPA and determine the credits you earn. These are also the grades that colleges will see when they look at your transcript.
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Freshman Year: 9 th grade
Sophomore Year: 10 th grade
Junior Year: 11 th grade
Senior Year: 12 th grade

Freshman Year: Setting Your Priorities and Managing Your Time:
As a high-school freshman, you'll find that your academic and extracurricular obligations are considerably greater than they were in eighth grade. High school doesn't ask you to do the impossible—you'll have to wait for college for that—but it also doesn't make it easy to catch up when you slack off. When you enter high school, the world starts treating you as a grownup.

Time Management
The secret to managing a busy schedule is carefully budgeting your time.

Think about it: There are 168 hours in a week. You probably sleep 55 to 65 hours a week. You're in school 30 to 35 hours a week. That leaves you with approximately 75 hours a week to play around with. That sounds like a lot, huh?



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Setting Goals for High School
Make Sure Some of Your Goals are Short-Term
Imagine making the following three goals as a freshman:

A. I want to have a 3.5 cumulative GPA by the end of high school.

B. I want to be admitted to a selective college on the west coast.

C. I want to be an engineer after college.

Sophomore Year: Time to Narrow Down Your Extracurricular Activities:

Hopefully in 9th grade you got a chance to sample some of the cool activities that your high school offers.Maybe you didn't stick with all of them, but at least you tried them out. Now that you're in 10th Grade (Sophomore).
College admissions officers have certain things they're going to look for as far as your extracurriculars go. But we'll get to that in a minute. First, here's the game plan we suggest for sophomores:
* Join or remain in organizations that interest you or that you enjoy.

* Quit organizations that waste your time or that you hate.

* Focus on organizations that allow you to develop, give you responsibility, and offer leadership potential.

Consider choosing activities based on potential careers or majors:
If you are strongly interested in a particular career or major, then consider activities, jobs, or community service opportunities that allow you to explore that field. That way, if you later decide that you want to pursue the career or major, you'll have some background in it already. The opposite situation is also valuable. If the activity, job, or service project makes you realize that you're not interested at all in that field, then it's a good lesson to learn while you're still in high school.

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Preparing for the Barrage: Junior Year

So your high school is having a college fair, you're getting letters in the mail from schools you haven't even heard of, and it seems everyone wants to know what your plans are for the future. "But I'm only a junior!" you say.

Most schools hope that students will have an interest in their institutions by the summer between their junior and senior year of high school. This is a time when most high school students are thinking about college, even if they weren't a few months earlier. It is also a time when students will have an opportunity to explore colleges. Through mailings and high school visits, schools invite students to attend open houses or schedule private visits during the summer.

The Numbers Game
Test scores, GPAs, class rank, ratios, rentention rates, tuition: numbers, numbers, numbers!
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Taking the Mystery Out of Majors
What is a major?
In many ways, a major is like a contract between you, the student, and the school you attend. By declaring a major, you the student agree to perform certain work, (i.e. classes) in exchange for a college degree. In looser terms, a major is simply an organized collection of classes, either revolving around a subject (e.g. mathematics), theme (e.g. peace studies), or professional field (e.g. Pre-Med, Pre-Law, Engineering, etc.)


Small Colleges: the Benefits

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