The end of junior year is on the horizon, and visions of sleeping in until 11 and watching Gossip Girl are running through your head. We know you worked hard this year, and you want to just do nothing, but this is also the last year of your college admissions journey. You gotta push through!! Summer is the largest chunk of uninterrupted time you’ll have before the full weight of senior year is upon you, and you need to use this time wisely.
Hopefully, you’ve spent your high school career building a niche and exploring your interests, but if you haven’t, we have some ideas too. It’s important to have a niche when applying to colleges–especially top-tier ones–because it proves to colleges that you’ve taken the initiative to explore your potential major and have put in the work to establish yourself. Keep reading for more ideas on how to expand your niche and use your summer to help boost your applications.
Summer Programs
Want to get a taste of what college will feel like, all while potentially earning credit, expanding your knowledge, and meeting other students who share your *zest* for a common topic? Summer programs might be your jam. There are summer programs for every potential area of study under the sun, like arts, pre-law, computer science, sports management, entrepreneurship, creative writing, behavioral economics, and film. Literally, anything you can imagine! You can take a summer program in it!
Now that you’ve done your research, it’s important to make sure you’re choosing a program that actually fits in with the niche you’re building. Maybe you want to do a film program, but you’ve spent your high school career building out interests in business. It may not be the best way to spend your summer, and remember that you can explore any additional interests once you get to college.
Online Classes
Typically, we suggest taking online classes through sites like Coursera, The Great Courses, Yale’s Open Courses, or Linkedin Learning. For juniors, you should be aiming a little higher than that. Similar to the summer programs, some colleges and universities offer online summer courses for college credit. Cornell’s pre-college program is entirely online, Columbia offers a number of online courses for credit, and there are many other schools that do the same.
Taking a college credit course will allow you to get a taste for the rigor that’s expected of you in college and allow you to explore a niche interest even further. The benefit of pre-college programs is that you typically have dozens of classes to choose from, so you’re destined to find a few that fit what you want.
Get a Job
Make some money! Get some responsibility! Colleges love it. Jobs may not fit exactly into your niche, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try. A receptionist job at a startup, teaching coding to kids, an athletic trainer apprenticeship at the local college, all of these can help show colleges that you not only explored your interest academically, but practically. Especially for more ~esoteric~ majors, this can be a great way to show how you might apply this major in your real life.
Intern
Okay, so, here’s the deal with internships: it can be insanely hard to find one that is meaningful and gives you real practical experience in your potential field. A lot of times, companies do not want to give you, the plucky 17-year-old, any real responsibility, and you will often be relegated to making copies, getting coffee, and sitting silently at a computer while you play the NYT crossword because you couldn’t think of anything else to do. If you can find an internship where you get to complete a real project or do some actual challenging work, do it.
Research
It’s the big one folks. The white whale. The golden goose. The Birkin bag of summer high school experiences. Conducting research with a college professor in your chosen field and getting it published is one of the strongest things you can put on your resume. However, it is not easy to get. We recommend emailing professors who study in your interest area and pitching yourself as their research assistant. If nothing else, connecting and talking with professors can be super valuable and give you insight into your field.
Write your Common App essay
Yeah. You heard us. Write it now. Get it over with! The hardest part of writing the Common App essay is the brainstorming, and you don’t want to spend all of October trying to figure it out (while dealing with midterm exams and all the stress of senior year) and then scrambling on October 30th to write it before Early Decision is due. The stress is not worth it. Write your essay during June and July, get it done, and be leaps and bounds ahead of your peers.
Take those final SATs and ACTs
Similar to above, we recommend taking your last standardized admissions exams over the summer. You don’t want to be studying for them at the same time as you have mountains of homework and essays and tests at school. Using your uninterrupted time to study and master these tests will probably lead to higher scores and less stress come senior fall.
You have one more summer to make your application stand out. We know. Insane. Summer is only three-ish months, and it’s not a ton of time, but it’s also your only uninterrupted chunk of time to get work done. Without the pressure of school, you will be able to accomplish a lot more with your time. Deadlines are approaching for applying to summer programs and internships, so get a move on.
If you need help navigating the college admissions process, developing your extracurriculars, or planning your summer, reach out to us today.