What exactly are individual top colleges looking for?

droppedit
Wed, 07 Jun 2017 06:17:50 +0000

@TiggerDad – I’m of the same mindset … but after watching my D18 get more involved in school because she wants to look good for colleges, I’ve somewhat changed my view. For kids like mine, the demands of the top colleges force them to get involved in things they wouldn’t have done otherwise. Even though the original motives may not have been “pure”, the result is kids doing things that give them experience in different areas. D18 right now is at our State U working in a lab. That probably wouldn’t have happened had she followed my advice in 9th grade to “do what interests you”, which ended up with her sitting on the sofa on her phone and unhappy through 10th grade. Instead, as a rising senior she’s working on a grad student’s research of “non-coding RNA”, doing PCRs, and other things that I barely understand. She may end up hating it, at which point we’ll say “now we know you don’t want to do that” and look elsewhere.