3 Tips for High School Students to Standout in the Crowd come admissions time

What stands in the way of you getting that last spot at Harvard or winning a scholarship? It might be the student sitting to you in class says high school counselors in a recent survey. A survey of 740 high school counselors conducted by Arizona State University MBA graduates asked counselors, "“What do you feel is a senior’s biggest obstacle to getting into top college programs or obtaining a scholarship?” and one of the top responses was a "competition amongst classmates". While ”Lack of initiative or starting too late in the process” and “Poor SAT/ACT testing or GPA” were the top two recorded responses, competition among classmates was recorded more than responses like, "Money" or "Family situations".

Collegeboard.com writes, "The majority of colleges indicate that they are looking for well-rounded students." Which essentially means, colleges prefer applicants who can demonstrate balance among academics, extracurricular activities, and their personal lives; however, Collegeboard.com does warn against attempting to pad your resume by joining multiple organizations or activities, "When admissions officers look at resumes, they are attempting to assess leadership, commitment, and integrity… [but] If you're an overachiever, beware. More is not necessarily better.”

So what can students do to stand out in a crowd of their peers?  Below you’ll find three suggestions from the WhatisAverage team.

• Get Involved – In Something *YOU* Like:  FastWeb.com states that “winning scholarships isn’t about having the longest list of extracurriculars. It’s about communicating who you are and what you care about through the activities you participate in and enjoy.”  While this comment is geared towards scholarships, the same holds true for college admission too. 
  
  So, what does this mean for you as a student (or as the parent of a student)?  Well, it means that it is important to get involved in extracurricular activities, volunteer work, church stuff – whatever is interesting to you, will capture your attention, and is something you’re passionate about.  The key is not to be just be involved to put it on your resume, but to enjoy it enough to talk about it in essays, in interviews, and in general.  Typically admissions officers and scholarship committees can tell if you’re just padding your resume versus being involved in something you love.
  
• Update Your Resume:  Now that you’ve been involved in activities that are meaningful to you, it’s important to update your resume to reflect this involvement… and to choose those individuals who will write references for you too.  There are a ton of different resources online that give tips to writing a resume, like “Resume Writing 101” on CollegeBoard. While these tips are typically geared towards job or internship placements, they give some general ideas that can be really helpful as you prepare your individual resume for college applications and scholarships.
  
  Your resume should highlight who you are as a student and as a person, focusing on your school activities and extracurriculars – and it should also be geared towards whatever you’re using it for.  This means that your college-admissions resume may look different than the resume for one of your scholarships… and tailoring your resume to meet the needs of each application can only help you!
  
• Choose Your References:  One of the last pieces of advice to stand out among your peers and the competitiveness of your graduating class is to carefully and purposefully choose the individuals who will write your letters of reference or recommendations.  While FastWeb.com gives an indepth review of choosing individuals for your letter of reference, ACTstudent.org gives some brief recommendations on making the most of personal references. 

• Ask people who know you and can support the recommendation well.
• Prepare a neat and legible reference form.
• Give your references plenty of time—a school counselor isn't likely to write glowing recommendations for last-minute requests! Allow at least two weeks before application deadlines. [At WhatIsAverage.com we recommend asking early – some counselors require a timeline of at least a month for a letter of recommendation!]

Your letters of recommendation should give your application more context on why you’re so great, explaining why colleges should choose you, and why you should be given scholarship money.  With this in mind, you want to choose people who can offer a well-rounded view of who you are as a student.  We’d recommend choosing someone who knows you academically and can speak to your academic merits… then choose someone who can speak to your personality and other involvements: maybe a coach, your supervisor at work, someone you volunteer with, or your leader in whatever extracurricular activity you’re involved in. 

With all of this talk of standing out among your peers and competition among classmates, it’s important to understand that you can’t just focus on extracurriculars, that your GPA and SAT/ACT scores still matter!  It doesn’t matter how purposefully involved you’ve been, if your grades are too low to be considered competitive for admission into the school of your choice, you won’t get far in the application process.  With this in mind, stay focused on the numbers too!