It can feel hard to work on your project in the midst of global and local uncertainty. The first thing you should do is recognize that there are no wrong ways to react to the corona virus and that everyone handles stress differently. But there are a few other things to bear in mind...

I first started thinking seriously about college when I was entering 10th grade because my high school was only 10th through 12th grade. I knew that to get into a good school I would need a great SAT or ACT score and to keep my grades up. What I didn't know though is what exactly I wanted to do or university I wanted to go to. I thought about it mainly in terms of which location would make me the happiest because I heard most schools in the top 10 were similar in difficulty getting in. I love the busyness of New York City and decided to look at Columbia and NYU.

Applying to college can be very stressful, especially given how competitive it currently is to get into a top institution. It’s important to find ways to distinguish yourself and stand out from other candidates. For the application process, colleges in the United States use a holistic process to evaluate you, which means they don’t just look at one thing to determine how suitable you are, but the whole picture of you as an applicant. This holistic approach may differ in other countries, but I will focus on applications to institutions in the United States. One very good way to build out a full application is with a strong set of extracurricular activities.

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.

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.