This past spring, U.S. News visited La Jolla High School in the San Diego Unified School District to ask several seniors who had recently gone through the college application process and were then weighing their options for lessons learned along the way — and their best tips for high school students just getting started.
Set in a postcard-perfect seaside community, La Jolla High is a comprehensive high school serving about 1,650 students. Because of the district’s emphasis on school choice, students from an array of San Diego neighborhoods attend La Jolla.
The school provides Advanced Placement courses in 21 curricular areas; 98 percent of students graduate, on average, and 70 percent go on to four-year colleges (about 22 percent go to a two-year school). White students comprise 56 percent of the student body, with Hispanics, Asians and African-Americans accounting for most of the rest.
An ACL injury led Emily Young to become “fascinated” with biomedical engineering and biomechanics, she says. That interest led to an internship at a University of California–San Diego biomechanics lab, where Young processed data and MRIs for research on rotator cuff problems.
Young’s interest, internship and an early action application helped her get into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she will study mechanical engineering with a concentration in biology and will also be playing lacrosse. She also got into Northeastern University in Boston, and she applied to the University of California–Berkeley, the University of California–Los Angeles and Georgetown University but withdrew those applications once she heard from MIT.
Young figures she put a solid month of work into the MIT application, including reading four years’ worth of the university’s admissions blogs, which offer advice and highlight accepted students.
GPA: 3.9 unweighted
ACT score: 33 composite
Extracurriculars: Captain of field hockey and lacrosse teams, anti-bullying club, Girl Scouts, elementary-school lacrosse coach, internships in a biomechanics lab and as a pastry chef (which she suspects got admissions “to look at my application for a second longer”)
Essay: She described the world she comes from, a family of “engineers, psychologists and doctors” who “inspire me to set high expectations for myself.”
Smart start: She began considering schools at the end of her freshman year to improve her chances of being recruited for lacrosse.
Realization: “Coaches can’t pull you through admissions” at schools like MIT, she says.
Lesson: Her father, who hires fellows in his medical practice, showed her how little time it takes to screen an application. It’s about 45 seconds.
Advice: It’s better to focus on a couple of schools than to spread yourself thin by applying to 20. Also, “the first sentence of your essay needs to be incredible,” she says. She added that you need a strong finish.
This story is excerpted from the U.S. News “Best Colleges 2015” guidebook, which features in-depth articles, rankings and data.
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