Help! I’m a high school Junior and my school is closed. How can I prepare for college applications?
- Eileen Kropf
- Mar 22, 2020
- 3 min read
Are you a Junior whose school is closed due to the Covid 19 crisis? You may have planned to visit colleges during spring break, but this is now impossible. Or, you might be worried that you won’t be able to participate in a summer internship, which many rising Seniors do as a capstone to their high school career. Do you wonder how all this will effect your college applications, or what you can do now to prepare for applying to college next year?
This is a serious time when everyone’s first priority is to take care of their health. But there may be a sliver lining to being out of school now. Juniors may have more time now to research colleges and use online college application tools. Here are a few suggestions for how you can use your time at home:
Virtual College Tours and Student Blogs
The necessary closing of college campuses in the wake of the Covid 19 pandemic will make huge changes in how Juniors prepare for applying to college next fall. For one, it is likely that many prospective applicants will not be able to visit colleges before they apply. Likewise, this year's admitted students who have not yet visited their colleges will probably need to make their final decisions without that visit. Students need not worry too much, though. There are other tools that they can use to get a feel for a college.
Most colleges now have a virtual tour on their admissions webpage. This is a good way to see how a college looks and even feels. Take a look at the following to see how various colleges do it:
University of Virginia:
Virginia Commonwealth University:
Stanford University:
Purdue University:
Georgia Institute of Technology:
MIT doesn’t have a virtual tour, but it does have some other great resources such as MIT student blogs, that can be very helpful in making a decision about applying to the university.
Contact Alumni from your High School
You can also email graduates from your high school who are attending the colleges on your list. You may have their contact information or your school counselors may have a list of alums whose contact information they can share.
Naviance and Other College Application Tools
For students at home, this is also a good time to use the online college application tools that many high schools provide for their students, such as Naviance. Naviance has a great resource called Scattergrams that shows students where they fit among students from their high school who were previously admitted to specific schools. This is a great tool for whittling down a student’s college list and determining which of the colleges on the list would be “sure bets” or “safeties” — colleges where a student’s GPA and standardized test scores match most of those of previously admitted students; which would be “likelies” — where the student’s GPA and test scores are similar to many previously admitted students; and which would be “reaches” — colleges where the student’s GPA and test scores are lower than most previously admitted students.
No Summer Internship? Register for an Online Class
As the crisis continues, it may be difficult for many Juniors participate in internships this summer. Every Junior will be in the same boat, however, so colleges will likely be understanding. One alternative is to register for an online class in the area in which a student would have had an internship. Although the following programs are normally in-person, they may need to shift to online this summer:
American University Community of Scholars Program for rising Juniors and Seniors:
Boston University Summer Programs for High School Students
To summarize, having to be home this spring could well prove to have a silver lining for Juniors. You may now have more unscheduled time to spend honing your college list and drafting your Common App essay, which could give you a great headstart in the college application process. You don’t need to leave home to use the online tools discussed above, or to start brainstorming ideas for your college essay. You might want to see this time as a bit of a gift -- unstructured time in which to focus on finding a good-fit college and getting a headstart on preparing the best application you can.
For more on this topic, see two recent articles:
How to Make College Decisions When Campuses are Closed, New York Times, March 15,
2020: The Year that Shredded the Admissions Calendar, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 15,
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