How to Prepare for College

INTRO Whether you're roaming the high seas or moving across the country all by yourself to start fresh, all adventures begin with the same step—planning and preparation. And college is no different. Applying to college is exciting and stressful and lots of other things that cause a whole spectrum of emotions, but you can take steps now that will make the college admissions process a lot easier once you get to that point. And if you're not quite sure where to start, we've got you. Hi, I'm Erika Brzozowski, and this is Crash Course How to College, a Study Hall series presented in partnership with Arizona State University and Crash Course. INTRO College is all about a lot of things, and all those new experiences can get overwhelming. That's why it's so important to get organized early. You'll probably need certain documents over and over, and it's a tremendous pain to have to dig through your desk drawers or your downloads folders to find them every time. So it's a good idea to create a file system that works for you, like a separate college prep folder on your computer that has all these documents. In general, setting up a storage system that makes it easy to find your documents will save lots of time in the long run. And it's even worth deciding on a naming convention or a format for how you name all of your documents so even if you lose something, you know how to search for it. Something simple that also explains what the thing is usually works, like "Brzozowski Personal Statement." Once you've gotten organized, the next step is to think about your goals for the future. This helps you focus on what is most important to you in a school. Short-term goals are goals that are able to be achieved in a few weeks or months. When preparing to apply to college, a short-term goal might be to get all your documents organized. They can also be goals focused on helping us become more well-rounded students, like maintaining a personal calendar to help you manage your time, or reading a new book each month to expand your knowledge and interests. Long-term goals require longer periods of consistent work to achieve. A long-term goal could be maintaining a 3.0 grade point average through your senior year of high school. 3.0 is the national average for high school students throughout the United States, and it's a GPA that can help you get accepted to most colleges. Or maybe your long-term goal is to one day own your own business, and knowing that can help you decide what colleges to apply for. Like maybe you want to research schools that are known for business degrees, or trade schools that will help you develop skills to set up your company. We can revisit and adjust our goals as often as we need, but we want to make sure they're realistic and measurable. Then we can figure out what steps we need to take to achieve them. And no matter where you are in life, thinking about what additional courses can help you prepare for college is another important step on our planning journey. If you're in high school, this might mean challenging yourself with honors, advanced placement, or international baccalaureate programs. These are programs designed to be more rigorous in some ways and help high school students prepare for college-level courses. AP and IB courses also let you earn college credit by taking a final exam at the end of the course. Dual-enrollment courses mean you're earning high school and college credits at the same time. Unlike AP and IB, many dual-enrollment courses are available to students taking the GED in lieu of traditional high school classes. AP, IB, and dual-enrollment courses can have additional fees, but they're great opportunities to earn college credits for a lot less money before you even start college, which gives you a head start. And by starting college with a few credits under your belt, you can make more time during your degree for extra experiences like studying abroad and internships. What we're doing here with Study Hall, a collaboration between Arizona State University and Crash Course, is providing a path to start learning academic topics on YouTube, which lead directly into college credit courses. You can start any time without applying to the university, pay after you complete the course, and be able to transfer the credit to most universities. It's also never too early to think about specific steps in the admissions process, like preparing for college entrance exams, which are exams like the SAT and ACT that measure how different groups of students perform relative to others. You can prepare for these by taking prep exams like the PSAT and Pre-ACT. One of the biggest advantages of taking these preliminary exams is that you can get to know the testing process and the types of questions you'll need to answer. Colleges will not see your scores for these practice exams, so this is a great way to practice with less pressure. Since it's possible to improve your score, some educators recommend taking a standardized test.