@MWolf has wise advice. Watching the US admissions process from my somewhat protected perch in Asia, I was shocked by the extent to which the process seems to have kind of overtaken the rest of high school in the US. I didn’t start reading CC until sometime in S19’s junior year, by which time his course was more or less set, but I could feel how difficult it would be to avoid getting caught up in it all in a US school environment. In our case, we basically followed a strategy that would have been appropriate when I was growing up - do your best, have some fun, try and figure out what you like, what you are good at and where you’d like to spend the next four years. It was pretty stress-free and everything worked out fine. We were lucky. Based on advice I read here, I did push him pretty hard to work on his essays during his junior year summer, and I think that saved him a lot of grief in the fall. Other things I learned about on CC that were of great value included Early Action - it was wonderful to have a few acceptances in hand by December rather than sweat it out until March - and merit scholarships. I just assumed S19 wouldn’t receive any help of any kind, and I still remember being amazed the first time I ran a few NPCs and projected merit money popped up. People talk mostly about how merit money helps from a financial perspective, but in our case, I think the fact his school believed in him and wanted him enough to make the award made a big impression on our son. I also found the advice on ED to be very valuable - we thought about it, evaluated the potential advantages, realized S19 did not have a clear first choice, and didn’t do it. We did put a lot of effort into visiting schools, a first round to help him figure out what kind of school he wanted - turned out he had a clear preference for LACs - and a second round to visit schools where he’d been accepted. He visited his current school for the first time on that second round and immediately knew he’d found a home.