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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is our first, she's in public school (west coast) and we didn't have a clue. We didn't talk about college at all until midway through her sophomore year when we decided to meet with a private college counselor for one hour to advise on how many AP's to take junior year. To that point, all the advice we had heard from school counselors, other parents, and even her pediatrician was "Do less! No need to take more than one or two AP's a year. Just focus on well-being!" The meeting with the counselor was a wake-up call. She encouraged DD to take on more rigor (DD was well-adjusted, all A's, and in retrospect underchallenged in classes). DD thrived with more AP's junior and senior year, and I'm really grateful for the advice from that counselor. Depends on the kid of course.
- picking ECs, competitions, projects, summer activities? DD picked these mostly, but she cared most about her two sports. I know these don't matter much for admissions (another thing we didn't know) but because she was passionate about them ended up a varsity captain of both team sports senior year and national champion with one (niche sport). She liked journalism sophomore year, and because of that I did encourage her to keep signing up for it and she's now EIC this year and really enjoying it. Lastly, we were advised that she needed something academic to talk about, so she took a guess about an area of study she might like, we brainstormed a related EC more to try out the subject than for an admissions point, and she ended up loving that EC, going far with it, and writing her essay about it. But she did not start it until junior year. There was one and only one activity that I pushed: a summer activity that seemed to tie all her interests together. I regret pushing it. She did it, but she was never into it and it resulted in conflict between us. And it doesn't look that great anyway because she just did the bare minimum
-choosing schools? She created her school list mainly based on her niche sport (club). There was no dissuading her from this approach! She's adaptable and I think will be happy at any of the ten that she applied to, which ended up being quite a range of sizes, urban & rural, etc. We did take her to visit almost every school she applied to. 
- application story or strategy? Basically just what I described above. She did the app and activities list etc. mostly on her own. 
- essays? Helped brainstorm ideas. She did the writing. 
- reviewing the final common app? Proofread the whole thing
In the end, her profile is more well-rounded than spiky, and she has ED'd to a T10 LAC. Will update in a week or so. [/quote]

Sigh.  Another west coast interloper.  [/quote]

Lots of non DMV ppl posted (including me though I didn’t identify). How is it relevant?[/quote]

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