Student Planning Timeline - Your Timeline to Planning for College
This Student Planning Timeline will serve as your year-by-year guide to ensure that you are doing everything you can in high school to prepare yourself for college. As early as 9th grade there are important things you can do to make yourself the best candidate you can possibly be for college admission.
When evaluating your admissions application, colleges consider a wide variety of information including your grade point average (GPA), class rank, standardized test scores, extracurricular activities, and advanced-level coursework.
The following points are things you should keep in mind throughout your high school experience if you want to go to college:
- Plan early and work hard to keep your options for college open.
- Take responsibility for your grades and your learning.
- Challenge yourself academically. Grades are important, but colleges also pay attention to the difficulty of your coursework. If you want to apply to a selective college, take AP, honors or college-level courses, if available.
- Know deadlines and meet them! This is extremely important, whether it's a deadline for testing or submitting an admissions application or filing financial aid information.
This may seem obvious, but you must stay on top of submission dates because different schools have different deadlines. You may want to create a special calendar to keep track of test dates, due dates and deadlines concerning college.
To find out what you need to do each year, just click on the appropriate grade level in the left-hand navigation. The Student Planning Timeline also provides information about entrance requirements to the community college system and North Carolina's public and private colleges and universities so you can double-check that you're on target for the college of your choice.