Your college profile encompasses everything you’ve done through your high school years. Developing it requires time and consideration so you can put your best foot forward with admissions departments and potential mentors. At Zenith Prep Academy, we specialize in long term college profile development and preparation. It is our goal to give you the best opportunity possible to achieve acceptance into the country’s top universities, or your money back.
Learn how to build a college profile with us today, or enroll in our program to gain full college preparation support from grades 6-12.
Defense: Academic Achievements
It all starts with your academic profile. At Zenith, we call this “Defense”: if you are playing a sport, you won’t get very far if you don’t have strong defensive capabilities—but, as we’ll see in the rest of this article, defense is not enough. No matter what college you are applying to—whether that is a seeking admission to a top 25 school or hoping for a strong merit scholarship from a top 100 school—you need strong defense that includes:
- GPA: In general, your work in 11th and 12th grade will matter more than your GPA in 9th and 10th grade, but it is all important. You want to create as much of an upwards trajectory as possible.
- Course Rigor: Colleges don’t just look at your raw GPA. They also want to see you challenging yourself with the most rigorous AP, IB, or Dual Enrollment classes your school offers. If your options at your school are limited, Zenith counselors can help you find alternatives.
- Standardized Tests: While some colleges started going “test optional” in 2020—meaning that they do not require standardized tests—many colleges (especially top 10 schools like MIT and Georgia Tech) have moved back to requiring the SAT or ACT. Standardized test scores are important, but you don’t want to over-invest in test prep at the expense of GPA, Course Rigor, and Extracurricular achievement. Zenith counselors can help you find the right balance.
Offense: Extracurricular Activities
Colleges in the United States don’t just care about GPAs and test scores. Indeed, top schools like MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Yale will often turn away students with perfect GPAs and Test Scores if they do not also have compelling extracurricular profiles. That is why we call the Extracurriculars “Offense”: this is when you get beyond just firming up your academic foundation and show colleges why you should be admitted over all the other students with strong academic profiles.
Basic extracurriculars that are good, but common, among student populations are:
- Participating on a high school or club sports team.
- Being part of a club at school.
- Signing up for a volunteer activity outside your school.
These are all great ways to start an offensive strategy, but for the most competitive universities these common activities are usually not enough to secure admissions. To go deeper:
- Research: A STEM student might start the process of researching machine learning algorithms in 9th or 10th grade, publishing an initial research paper in 10th grade, and then use that research experience to secure a research internship.
- Community Leadership: Any student can look out at their community, see a challenge, partner with existing community organizations to find a solution and—with multiple years of collaboration—rise to a leadership level and start up a new initiative.
- Passion Projects: Sometimes if you have a strange or unusual interest, the deeper you go in it, the more unique your profile can become. If you love knitting, you might start by making gifts for family members, then branch out into making YouTube videos teaching others how to knit, starting up an entrepreneurial business, or even teaching local classes that let people trade personal stories about challenges in their life, using knitting as a way to connect. The further you let your creativity take you, the bigger an impact you can make.
Every student’s offensive strategy looks different. Finding the right mixture of activities and balancing those activities while maintaining a strong defensive position in your core academics is the key to college admissions success. Zenith counselors specialize in helping students and families find this balance.
Telling Your Story: Personal Statement and Essays
When you do apply for college, you’ll need to tell your story to explain what you did in high school and what that journey of growth and development meant to you. Colleges only give you a limited space to tell that story with a few essays and a resume.
There are a thousand different ways to write these narratives—all you need to do is try googling “College Essay Writing” and be bombarded with general advice from all directions. These essays will probably be the most important thing that you write in your whole life: if you have strong offense and defense, a good essay can get you into the Ivy League, while a substandard one will get you lost in the pile of other applicants.
At Zenith, we work one-on-one with students to find the right way to tell your story in the limited space that applications allow.
Validating Your Story: Letters of Recommendation
While letters of recommendation fall to teachers and mentors to provide, you have a lot of agency is making these letters as strong as possible.
- Good letters of recommendation come from good relationships with teachers and mentors. Zenith counselors coach you from day one on how to make a good impression that makes teachers and mentors excited to recommend you.
- Who recommends you matters: Believe it or not, STEM schools like MIT like to see a recommendation from BOTH a STEM teacher and a Humanities Teacher. You can’t just focus on your math and science classes and get an optimal set of letters.
- Your teachers will often ask you to provide them with information on your goals and accomplishments so that they can write the best letter possible. Zenith can coach you on the best kind of information to give them.
Whether you’re preparing to start high school or you’re starting to submit applications, Zenith Prep Academy’s college profile builders are ready to help. Enroll today and let us help you develop a college profile that drives results.
