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9th-11th Graders

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Please contact Jasmine Rainey if you have any questions at jasmine@peakedu.org

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So, you want to go to college? Did you know that what you do in the 9th-11th grade sets the foundation for you having a successful senior year and admission (applying to college) process! Below are the THREE main keys to getting into a college and receiving scholarships. Remember to ACE your applications.

A-Academics

C-Community Service

E-Extracurricular Activities

Academics

Do your best to earn good grades each year.
Speak with your teachers early if you're struggling in a class. Get help, ask questions, get tutored if needed!
Take rigorous courses! Colleges like to see that you challenged yourself. So, if you high school offers honors, AP, IB or dual enrollment courses, take advantage of them.

Community Service

Start this early (e.g. 9th grade)! You should be doing community service every year and several times a year. Many of the large, full-ride scholarships look for significant community service or volunteering. So, figure out what you're passionate about and find or create your own volunteering opportunities. Try to volunteer a few hours each month or every other month. This will allow you to have a lot of volunteer hours by the time you become a senior and start to apply to the large scholarships of senior year!
Track your hours. Create a spreadsheet, journal or document where you put the dates, number of hours and a description of the volunteer activity every time you do it!
Quality over Quantity. Remember that college and scholarships prefer quality over quantity. They would rather you volunteer regularly with three organizations that you're passionate over the last three years that to do 15 volunteer activities where you only spend 1 day on each activity. So, create QUALITY involvement.
You can find or start opportunities at your school, in your community or on volunteermatch.org.
Think about why you're volunteer for the specific activity that you choose. What impact are you making? Why do you care? Why are you passionate about this activity? In the future, you'll most likely be asked to write about these activities and you want to share your passion and the impact you've made by doing this activity.

Extracurricular Activities

Get involved! Sports, work, clubs, hobbies all count towards extracurricular activities!
Figure out what you're passionate about and join or start a club. If you have to work instead, that's fine, but make sure you explain that on your college/scholarship applications and still make time to volunteer!
Quality over Quantity. Similar to community service, colleges and scholarships prefer seeing quality involvement for extracurriculars (e.g. participating regularly in 2 clubs over 4 years) over the quantity (e.g. 25 clubs where you didn't really participate and only spend a day/week on in each club).