By Christopher MacNeil and Akshatha Achar

Summer is a time of relaxation, rejuvenation, and important family time for students who have put maximum effort into their school’s courses and extracurricular activities. Our education consultants believe that a summer vacation away from school can be a great opportunity for families to relax and spend quality time together. Though as much as students may be excited about their newfound freedom during their extended break, it is important for college-bound students to stay active during this time. SAT classes and ACT test prep certainly count, as well as college scholarship research, but there are other ways to remain productive as well.

This period is also an opportunity for long-term planning. There is no better window to prepare for college admissions and to explore ways of enhancing the competitiveness of a student’s college application for the high-stakes world of contemporary university admissions. To that end, there are a variety of summer activities that are enriching, creative, and noteworthy—the kind that make admissions officers stop and take notice!

Get Involved in Research

Experience in academic research as a high school student is highly impressive to colleges and universities. Cold calling (directly reaching out without prior introduction) and emailing professors directly, while seemingly presumptive or even arrogant, are actually the best ways to communicate with professionals in the field at such a young age. Ambitious students in this circumstance are seen not as annoyances but as enterprising—you’ll be surprised how favorable such initiative is viewed! Additionally, consider leveraging family contacts by asking your parents to talk to anyone they know who is connected with a university to see if you can participate in a summer assistantship. Close contacts are the original network and should be plumbed for resources!

Create Your Own Project

Harness your talents and interests and ideate your own summer project. Some starters: form a band with some musically-inclined friends, practice, and seek out performance avenues. Teach yourself how to program. Engage your creative writing skills and submit your work to journals that publish high school students. Creativity is not only an undervalued trait in the admissions process but one that departments are increasingly seeking out as more and more students gravitate toward STEM majors. It makes students both more successful in STEM fields and contributes in other ways to campus life—again, another underappreciated aspect that applicants can demonstrate to stand out to admissions counselors.

Take a Free Online Course

Many online courses offered by platforms like edX and Coursera are self-paced and streamed directly from top universities! With a plethora of subjects ranging from Artificial Intelligence to entrepreneurship to poetry, you get to participate in lectures from Stanford, Harvard, UC Berkeley, and other top American and Ivy League universities. Many offerings are also of a more topical nature, allowing high school students to learn about many different fields at once without sacrificing rigor.

Be Entrepreneurial

Identify the real need for a service in your community, or start a business with friends. Summer is a great time to organize group activities that can both be personally satisfying and beneficial to your college application profile. Some ideas for self initiated community service are a food drive, a fundraiser for a good cause, or a nature clean-up. Other examples of entrepreneurial activities include starting a book club, contributing programming skills to app or web development, or selling products in your local community. All are excellent ways to foster a more entrepreneurial spirit in yourself and to set yourself apart in college admissions.

Volunteer in the Community

Continuity and commitment to community service are of the essence. Start now, and volunteer for a minimum of two hours a week through your senior year. Although COVID has made in-person volunteer opportunities far more scarce, students should strive in the coming months to seek out what they can—especially those opportunities that can be accomplished through distance. A great example is environmental protection, including beach and desert cleanups.

Commit to a Summer Reading Program

Colleges and universities want to admit students who are not only intellectually capable but are also naturally curious—the top stock from which researchers are made. One of the best ways to simultaneously broaden your horizons and make tangible gains in knowledge is to curate and execute a summer reading list. Fiction, nonfiction, biography and memoir: the best lists will include a little of everything while focusing on the student’s proposed course of study. Want to study economics? Read the texts of prominent economists like Smith, Galbraith, and Keynes. Interested in Russian Literature? Pushkin, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky are essentials. Some institutions even ask for abbreviated reading lists in the application!

Stay Busy while travelling

But what about students who travel? Our education consultants here in Dubai and in Abu Dhabi recommend staying active during these times through various virtual and self-initiated activities. As an example, many online courses are self-paced and allow a student to take the necessary time to complete. Moreover, students can also blog their summer activities and improve their writing skills through available online resources that focus on reflective writing. Likewise, forming a summer reading plan and achieving some additional learning goals will render a summer of travel more productive as well as ease the student’s transition back into the school year come August and September.

Conclusion

There are myriad ways by which enterprising students can maximize their summer breaks for the admissions process while also delighting in that necessary rest and relaxation that these months afford away from classes. Small gains made over the course of summer weeks really add up, and the end result is not only a more compelling college application but also a better and more productive student—you!

- Hale Education Group