I’m going into my junior year of high school. Here are all of my credentials/extracurriculars that I have or plan to have:
Member of the speech team freshman-senior. Junior captain sophomore-junior. Hopefully a captain senior year. Team is ranked 5th in our state (which is very competitive in the country)
Member of the debate team sophomore-senior. Captain junior-senior. Team won first in state. Sophomore year I won third at JV state.
Member of the lacrosse team 8th grade. Varsity from 9th onward.
Member of BPA. (Hopefully state or national appearances)
Started a middle school debate team. Treasurer and coach.
Started a middle school speech team. Treasurer and coach.
On the board of the Ambassadors at our school. Treasurer. junior-senior.
Elected excellence winner at a national speech camp (went there ever year sophmore-senior)
Please be honest on how I can work to make my application better! Thanks.
What is GPA? ECs are less important than academics. Sad to say, middle school will not count for anything. Class rigor is important. Are you taking APs?
Plan to take the SAT and ACT, one of them 3 times (the last in Sept or Oct of Senior year). Tutoring is expensive but can be very helpful; I’ve paid for tutors on 2 daughters and saw big improvements.
Remember that Harvard and the other tiptop elites turn down vals with 36 ACT and 1600 SAT and 4.0. They are reaches for everybody. So you should have a list of matches and safeties, depending on your academics.
My GPA is 3.95 unweighted and I haven’t taken an AP yet, but I’ve taken all of the honors classes my school offers. 'm taking 3 APs next year and a couple my senior year. I haven’t taken the ACT or SAT yet.
Duke, Harvard & Dartmouth are Reach schools for all applicants these days. While you can certainly still apply to such colleges, and should - if they are where you hope to attend, I strongly urge all highly qualified applicants to balance their approach to college admissions… applying to 3-4 safeties, 3-4 matches and 3-4 reaches. You can lower the risk of course by applying early where applicable, but absent such an early admit in-hand, it is better to be safe than sorry.
The colleges won’t pay much attention to any ECs during your middle school years. Apart from this, study hard, get good grades and do well on standardized tests.
Unless it’s a major national (won Scripps Spelling Bee) or international (competed in Socchi Winter Olympics) accomplishment, colleges don’t care about middle school.
No one can gauge your competitiveness without SAT/ACT scores.