Note: A lot of students will get copies of textbooks off the internet, though I don’t know how they do. Then, when they get to campus, they can buy used copies from older students. This works at schools where a lot of people taking the same classes can communicate with each other and the textbooks are used for multiple years. They have what they need from the beginning but then quickly switch to a real book as soon as they find a copy. Not sure about the legality of the digital copies. My son didn’t have digital copies when he arrived but quickly got used copies for $20-$50 apiece when they are $150 or more new.
@AlwaysNAdventure, I printed out your post #301 to show that someone living in my house. I think you wrote it for him 
I wish I could have gotten research experience as an undergrad…
I wish I would’ve known to start researching colleges and majors before my senior year, it would’ve changed a lot of priorities in my life, but hindsight is always 20/20.
visit schools as much as possiible, so you get a good feel for them.
I visited Berkeley twice, once on cal day and once during a school day, and I didn’t visit nyu except once in the summer so now I’m having a panic attack because I don’t feel like I really know what it’s like… so VISIT VISIT VISIT
get teacher recs early, and give them as much information as possible.
PREPEARE for your interviews and think of many different things to say, don’t go into them cold like I did… bad idea.
don’t be afraid to sound really overly sincere/cheesy/pretentious in your essays. It’s okay to make them over the top, even if that makes you uncomfortable like it did to me. The colleges I got into were all the ones I gave essays like that, not the ones I was more restrained in.
And don’t be afraid to make yourself seem more awesome than you really are, as other people will definitely be doing that to try to get an advantage. I don’t mean say you did activities that you didn’t do, but make yourself sound more enthusiastic about them than you are, and highlight all the good points of this… if that makes sense.
I have hard time making myself sound enthusiastic, because I’m just usually so calm about everything that I thought it sounded insincere, so I didn’t try to make myself sound that enthusiastic. And I think enthusiasm is really what admissions people are looking for.
Also, if you’re earlier in high school, DON’T be antisocial and not do extracurriculars. I have a friend who did this, and despite the fact that she’s really smart she got waitlisted or rejected to everywhere she applied, just because she came off as unenthusiastic and boring. So she’s going to be taking a gap semester and applying again…
And wherever you get in, you’ll find a good school for you, even if it wasn’t your first choice. I got rejected to all my first choices, but I still ended up with a good list of schools to choose from, and so will you
Texas A&M University(TAMU) and University of Texas(UT) will not admit transfer students who have a F or three drops on their junior college transcript. This is an unwritten rule.