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Welcome to High School!
* Meet with your school counselor. Establish a relationship with your counselor – you want them to know who you are. Discuss your goals and interests along with the academic opportunities at your high school to pursue both.
* Care about your grades. There is an unfortunate piece of misinformation floating around out there that freshman grades don’t matter. For the vast majority of colleges, THEY DO! Your GPA, class rank, and high school transcript will help colleges better understand your strengths and abilities – so start out strong!
* Get involved in your school and community. Join teams, clubs, community service leagues. Meet new people, represent your school proudly, donate your time and energy to charitable causes that inspire you, and make a difference. Colleges don’t want bookworms who will spend every waking hour in the library – they want real people who will make their community a better place.
* Make sure your classes, activities, and eventual college plans align. Of course, you want to have fun and experiment — that’s what this time in your life is for! The more specific college programs typically have firm expectations for high school applicants; for instance, most engineering programs want to see Calculus senior year (at a minimum), medical programs want to see Physics, AP Chemistry and AP Biology, and journalism programs want to see extensive involvement in school and local newspapers
Below are the Freshman presentations that are done in classes at the beginning of the year with the counselors and a career presentation:
