Your sophomore summer is your time to explore options, investigate your interests, and formulate a strategy for junior year and your college applications. While it may seem early to start thinking about this, we find that it’s helpful to start planning early: you can reduce the stress you’ll feel during junior and senior year if you get ahead now.
We think of sophomore summer as your time to start crafting your narrative—this is when you should start thinking about how to present yourself, and how you’d like colleges to see you. This is a great chance to start setting up the ‘story of your life’ that you’ll be presenting to colleges in your applications.
Summer opportunities come in two flavors: work and extracurriculars. What does that mean? It’s simple really.
Jobs
First things first: admission committees love jobs. If you haven’t found a summer job, think about looking for one. Pools are always hiring lifeguards, and you can probably find work as a barista at your local café or as a busboy at your local restaurant. Scooping ice cream is always an option. Even if you don’t need to work, think about it seriously. Holding a summer job is a great way to develop maturity and to learn what will be expected of you as an adult. It creates a touchpoint of commonality with the person reading your file (an adult with a job). Plus, that extra cash is always nice.
If you’re working a full-time summer job, great. Again, we find that colleges love it when students work over the summer: a paying job shows that you’ve got character, that you’re responsible enough to hold down a position.
You can work full or part-time and use your free time to explore your more academic interests and develop your resume.
Volunteering
Volunteering is also a good option, but you need to find something you’re truly passionate about and invested in, and it needs to fit into one of your identified areas of interest. Schools can tell if you’re just doing it to check a box: working one hour a month at the local animal shelter isn’t going to move the needle. However, stepping up to organize local donation drives for that shelter could show great initiative and leadership.
It doesn’t matter how prestigious the project is, as long as you’re seriously invested in it and it follows or adds to a narrative you are crafting. If you’re an environmentalist, and really want to help save the honeybees (they’re essential pollinators, after all), that’s fine. Work with your local beekeeping organization to culture hives and help your ecosystem.
Don’t invest your time in mission trips; holiday ‘voluntourism’ won’t help you. These trips have become such a cliché, and frankly, most of the time they’re an inefficient use of time and resources. If you’re paying to go abroad and help with a project, your money would most likely be more effective as a simple donation.
Identify your Interests
Now is the time to start thinking about your academic and extracurricular interests: what do you want to focus on?
If you joined 10 clubs, it’s best to pare them down to give a clear picture of what you’re interested in. If you’re planning on studying computer science, maybe think about focusing your activities on it: identify the clubs that align with CS (i.e. that Python coding club and your school’s technology club) and work towards leadership positions in them. If you’re that budding CS major, you can plan on dropping that history club (the one you always hated) when school starts up again: it’s better to have fewer, and deeper, interests. Identify what matters to you so that you can fully focus in on it.
If you’re having trouble identifying what truly interests you, that’s fine. Shoot us an email. It’s hard to know what you want to do with the rest of your life when you’re in high school. Try to think about which courses make you happy, which courses truly interest you. Is there anything that really stands out? If you loved that economics course you took, maybe think about business. If you loved designing that experiment for your psychology class, maybe think about pursuing that.
Remember that you can always change course: what’s important here is crafting a fitting narrative for your applications. Once you’re admitted you can always switch your major if your interests change.
Identifying your important interests will focus you during the upcoming school year, and guide you on whatever extracurricular/academic projects you choose this summer.
Focus
Your summer is (obviously) your largest block of free time: use it to hone in on whatever interests you identified. The easiest way to do this is with online courses and internships.
If you’re interested in history and identified pre-contact South America as the topic that really pulls you in, dive into it. Look through lists of online courses and see if you can find anything that appeals to you. Read up here for more advice on choosing an online course. If you’ve found something to your liking, pursue it.
Read the course materials and complete the homework and projects: you’ll learn a lot about how you’ll need to study to succeed in college. You’ll also show the schools you apply to that you’re deeply interested in whatever topic you selected.
If courses don’t appeal to you, or if you’d like more hands-on experience, look through lists of internships that are open to high-school students. Pick out a few and apply for them. If you really want to work for the National Parks Service one day, reach out to your local state park and see if you can help. Again, no matter the topic you choose, you’ll show how motivated and interested you are.
Use your sophomore summer to start building your narrative—and character—by keeping busy and working towards your interests.
If you have any further questions or would like to discuss junior-year advising with us, please feel free to reach out to us here.