Is all the work in high school worth it?

mathmom
Wed, 28 Aug 2013 15:47:39 +0000

A lot of the work in high school isn’t worth it. And the truth is you can get into a top 20 school without taking every AP your high school offers, or participating in every sport or doing a kajillion hours of community service. You need good enough grades (say top 2-5% in a typical public school), excellent scores (xiggi is right on the mark there, but they don’t have to be perfect - both my kids had writing scores under 700), and some interesting activities done at a pretty high level.

Neither of my kids did any sports at all. Both got state level medals at Science Olympiad, a fairly time consuming activity from about October to March, but not so much after that. They both only did community service summer before senior year, except for some not too time consuming projects related to their interests. Younger son was in two orchestra all four years. Older son spent hours every day playing with computers (sometimes for pay and sometimes as a volunteer helping scientists and sometimes just for fun.) Younger son parlayed a hobby of making origami into a small business selling at a local gallery. Neither took AP English. Only younger son took AP World, and only older son took AP Chem. They both took APUSH, AP Bio, AP Calc BC, and AP Physics BC. Younger son had a boatload of B’s (Latin, Chemistry) and just missed top 5%.

With that record older son got into Harvard and Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. Younger son into U of Chicago, Tufts and Vassar. They got 8 hours of sleep every night and played way too many video games.