For U.S. college applications, there are many components that determine their success. Of course, your grades are paramount and without passing the requisite thresholds, most other things won’t matter. However, if you have been able to get decent grades, then it becomes very important to consider the other aspects of your college application.

When I started my freshman year of high school, I noticed that a lot of students would take advanced placement (AP) tests for classes in which they were not in (or that they were in the pre-AP or honors version of the class that did not have an offered AP class at my high school). I thought that was peculiar at first, but then I realized that was honestly a smart thing to do. Read further, and I will explain why.

One of the hardest parts of high school is balancing everything that is happening. People often joke that you cannot “do it all”, and realistically, you cannot while still maintaining your health, friendships, and happiness. The way around this is learning how to combine things to kill two (or even more) birds with one stone and be opportunistic with your environment.

As a Chinese American woman I experienced this all the time. When I was little, my parents pushed me to study math and the sciences. I happened to be good at and enjoyed the attention that I got from being good in the STEM fields. As I grew older though, I grew tired of how people who did not even know me assumed that I was good at STEM. I started to realize people were categorizing me, my interests and career goals before even getting to know me.

My first year of high school, I joined the Service-Learning Team, a group that spent Tuesday afternoons at local elementary schools leading enrichment activities and spent Thursday afternoons discussing the socio-political components of our relationship with the students: underfunding of private schools, the cycle of poverty, and so on. I strongly believed in the mission of the group, but the work itself wasn’t for me—I wasn’t very good at arts and crafts or soccer, and I didn’t have a natural rapport with young children. So I made a decision that would ultimately come to occupy the majority of my free time in the next four years: I met with the director of the program, our school’s ethics teacher, and suggested we expand our outreach. In other words, I saw a missing piece, and I suggested how to fix it.

There is for sure one thing in common you hold with a lot of the top students in your high school (amongst the other obvious ones like you are all human go to the same high school, and other small obvious things), you all probably want to go to a good college!

Human beings are storytellers. Look around and you’ll see stories everywhere. Game of Thrones? A story. Call of Duty? A story. That huge billboard you drive by every day? The conversations you have with your friends? The warnings you tell your children? Stories. We make sense of the world and our own lives through narrative. Every experience that we have as human beings becomes integrated into our personal stories. The ones that we remember well, or that led to something significant, become part of our life story.

Holistic admissions: What does that really mean?