If you dream of building buildings or fancy mechanical structures, inventing the next lightbulb, or creating the next life-saving medical device, you’re probably interested in studying engineering. Or maybe you don’t even know that you want to study engineering, but you think that you might be! No worries; you’re in the right place.
Engineering is one of the most competitive majors you can apply to these days. Already competitive schools like MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, and Michigan have excellent engineering programs — but getting in is extremely competitive. However, you found this post as a sophomore in high school — a sign, perhaps?
Sophomore year is the best time to start college prep especially if you’re interested in attending top-tier schools and especially if you’re interested in studying something as competitive as engineering. colleges want to see you become a specialist within your topic of interest, so let’s talk about how to built out your niche.
Identifying the Niche
Unfortunately, you can’t just apply as an engineering major. Because that just doesn’t tell your prospective school very much about you. There are a lot of types of engineering and they all have their own very in-depth subfields.
We meet with clients and help them identify what it is they are excited about within a topic like engineering and help them explore it. We might start at a broader topic like engineering, then take it to electrical engineering, to specifically automation in electrical engineering. That last topic is where the niche lives, and we help students get there.
Classes and Books
In order to explore your niche, you’re gonna have to do some homework. Stop booing us, we’re right!!
This homework, though, is a little bit more fun than what you might have to do in school, because you’re actually going to be learning about things that you are excited to learn about. We work with each student one on one to create a personalized curriculum to help them learn about new ideas within their topic of interest and help them find that more narrow passion that colleges want to see. We do this by assigning different books and online classes that we know have helped students become specialists.
If you don’t know exactly where you wanna start with engineering, we might start with an online class that talks about the different types of engineering. From there, you might decide you’re really interested in biomedical engineering because you also have really enjoyed your natural science classes and you want to help people. We would then give you more books and classes that explore biomedical engineering. From that point, you might say that what you’ve really enjoyed learning about the most are the advancements in biomedical devices that help treat heart attacks, specifically stents. Now we‘ve found a niche!
Extracurriculars
Now that you’ve learned a little bit about what you want to study, we need to start putting it in action. Colleges like to see that you’ve taken steps to realize your interest, both in and out of school. In school, this might be joining the Women in STEM club, the robotics team, doing theater tech, anything that sort of gets you closer to your passion. The real heft of your extracurriculars will be outside of school — this might include an independent project, an internship, or research with a professor. Essentially, anything that shows depth of interest.
We think it’s important to strategize extracurriculars. We don’t think it’s smart to load up on a lot of things that don’t even tell the story you want to tell. All that does is waste your time and make it harder for you to explore the things you wanna explore.
Summer Plans
The next big thing to consider as a sophomore is the summer. Summer is the biggest uninterrupted block of time that you have as a high school student, and as much as we know you would love to just do nothing, you’ll have to do something. That’s why we help our clients plan a summer that allows them to explore their passions every year. Those out-of-school extracurriculars will get the most work during the summer – there aren’t a lot of other times when you’d be able to build some new kind of clock or do in-depth research with a professor without the added stress of the school year.
Summer programs are a really common way to start being exposed to what you’re interested in a concentrated. Essentially, you’ll see what it’ll be like to spend your whole day studying a certain topic, which is very similar to college. There are some programs for engineering at a lot of different colleges and a lot of different independent institutions, and they all fit into different parts of engineering (hence, the niche building). Because we work with students so closely we are able to figure out which programs are right for them, whether that be by topic, culture, level of engagement, and rigor.
Outside of summer projects, we try to help students find other things like a paid job, an internship or job shadowing, starting an independent project, or even snagging research with a professor.
Starting as a sophomore gives you enough time to explore the topics you’re actually interested in. We know it seems early, but you will already start working on college applications the summer between junior and senior year (i.e., next summer.) Starting as a sophomore also gives you enough time to figure out if this is what you actually want to study — we love helping kids get into top tier colleges, but we also love making sure they have found what they are truly passionate about.
If you want to start strategizing for college, sophomore year is the best time to start. Reach out to us today if you need help with your college prep plans.