The sun is starting to come out! The birds are chirping, flowers are blooming, and shorts weather is finally here. Spring may not be your favorite season, but it is certainly a refreshing break from the months of cold and gloomy New York City weather. What could possibly dampen the mood? College.
The Spring season marks a time of looming anticipation for all high school juniors as the reality of applying to colleges becomes apparent. Fortunately for Fieldston juniors, we began meeting with our college counselors back in early 2022 where we began talking about college types and possible major interests. These meetings helped us take full advantage of the two weeks of Spring break that many families used to tour several colleges. Finding the right college for you is a long process and requires a lot of research and touring, and is often made more difficult now due to the COVID-19 restrictions at various schools. But once you do find the schools you want to apply to, you can begin to write all of your different college applications. In the past, these applications were mainly centered around grades and standardized test scores, but over the course of the past few decades, that focus has shifted to something new. Having become more emphasized in recent years, a holistic approach to reviewing college applications has been adopted by most colleges and universities across the country.
But what exactly does that mean? The term “holistic” is often thrown around, especially at college information sessions, but is not often clearly defined. In reality, the concept and practice of holistic reviews is very simple. For your college application to be holistically reviewed just means that your entire application is looked at from your grades, to your essays, to your extracurricular activities. In addition to these factors, colleges may look into your background about your family obligations, social identifiers, and unique talents. What this hopes to accomplish is diversify the pool of admitted students in terms of their backgrounds, talents, interests, and more. Instead of interpreting a student’s value through grades and test scores alone, student’s are now valued for who they are and what they are interested in. Although this holistic approach has been around for a long time, it has become more valued recently because of how people view standardized testing.
People have had issues with the SAT and ACT for years. Both tests theoretically grade all students on the same scale, but in practice fail to factor in how a student might react to their testing environment, how their other responsibilities in life may affect their performance, or how their socio-economic status can infringe upon their ability to compete with other students. In reality, these tests that claim to “standardize” intellect and quantify it mainly serve to give students a grade based on something with too many inconsistencies to be considered anything but arbitrary. In recent years these tests have become extremely protested, with a heavy emphasis on the way it often favors students of a higher economic status. With so many schools now becoming test optional, students who may not have been able to afford the help needed to get a perfect SAT or ACT score are now able to competitively apply to schools like Harvard, Brown, and Cornell.
But this does not mean that grades are no longer important. Your high school transcript is arguably still the most important part of your application because they are an indication of how you will perform academically in college. In addition to grades, your activities list is also very important. Creating a good college application is like writing a story about yourself, it is about how well you can represent yourself and your interests to college admissions officers, and your list of activities is where you get to showcase these interests.
As Jameel Freeman–director of college counseling at Fieldston–puts it, “Authenticity still matters in the college process and students should view (and present) themselves as individuals with a commitment to academic achievement and personal development in areas of their lives that they deem important.”
The best possible thing that you can do to better your college application is to be true to yourself in a way that shows your passion for a hobby, a particular subject, or even a field of work. After all, thousands of applicants will have straight A’s and a high SAT or ACT score, but what really sets them apart? If they simply look like all of the other applicants, a college admissions officer would not want to accept them because they will have nothing new or unique to offer that college community.
So what should be taken from all of this? If I could turn back the clock to my freshman year of high school, I would do 2 things. First, I would get more involved around school. I would join more clubs, meet new people, maybe even try out for a sport I had never played before. This would allow me to explore more possibilities for the future and help me learn more about myself and my interests. Second, I would get more connected to my community. There is something to be said about living in New York City where you can see thousands of people a day and never see any of them again. Getting more connected to the city would allow me to take full advantage of its diversity and let me experience unique encounters on a daily basis enabling me to gain knowledge from people of all backgrounds. Together, these two things would let me find new passions in life and allow me to start pursuing those passions at a younger age, altogether giving me a stronger sense of direction that would help me stand out in the college application process.
