After May 1st, graduating college-bound seniors don’t have a whole lot to worry about. May 1st is the deadline for most accepted students to make a final decision about which college they are planning to attend and submit their Intent To Register with one college. After that, college application season is officially over along with exams— which means your officially done.
That being said, most of you have until August or September to do something and while relaxing and applying for an education visa are both vital and necessary, here are some other things you might want to do:
Set New Personal & Academic Goals
Once you’ve accepted a college offer, it’s pretty safe to say that a lot of your academic and college admissions goals have been achieved. While this is a great achievement and definitely a cause for celebration, you should still keep striving towards some achievable goals until you graduate. If you don’t set new goals for yourself after college application season has ended, your risk catching a severe case of Senioritis and possibly slacking off so much that you don’t pass your classes.
These new goals that you set for yourself don’t have to be ambitious or elaborate. All you need to make sure to include is keeping your grades up, leaving your extracurricular activities on a good note, and making sure that you are in good academic standing as you graduate. While these goals are very broad, they are the very minimum things that you should be striving for as a second-semester senior. Feel free to be more ambitious and maybe even take on one last project in high school if you are so motivated.
Plan a Productive Summer
This is just a continuation of what you have probably been doing with all of your high school summers. The common misconception that many graduating seniors have is that the summer before college is a time to relax before they start college. While a certain amount of relaxation time is nice, you should still try to do something productive and resume-building with your last summer before college.
Why would you want to do this? For starters, once you graduate, you will suddenly be qualified for college-level internships and other jobs that require a high school diploma. This could open doors for you in terms of work experience and even in terms of payment.
Secondly, once you enter college, you’re going to need to leverage every resume-worthy achievement or work experience that you have in order to land your first internship. That freshman year internship is often the hardest one to get, but it’ll be infinitely easier to earn if you have some productive summer achievement under your belt.
Study for AP Exams
Once you’ve accepted a college, you’re not quite through with your preparation for college. If the college you’re attending accepts AP, your big goal for the next few weeks should be to focus on studying for the AP exams you have coming up. The better you do on those exams, the more college credit you will earn.
You really want to try and get as much AP or IB credit as possible during high school because it could really set you ahead in college. In fact, it is possible to earn so much college credit through AP exams that you can enter college with sophomore standing. Also, you can also use AP exam scores to test-out of certain pre-requisite courses in college so that you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars re-taking those classes in college. Note: registration for AP exams in India have ended for this year, but you have registered, know that it can be worth a lot so don’t take it lightly
We hope this helps you! Best of luck <3