Dear High School Matt, You are about to make the biggest jump of your young life, try not to worry about it so much. It is a sig­nif­i­cant tran­si­tion, but you will soon find that you can han­dle it, so embrace it as soon as pos­si­ble. And I know that you stum­bled on UC Davis […]

Even though it’s been five years, I remem­ber what you’re going through all too well. Let’s see…you’re freak­ing out about pass­ing pre­cal­cu­lus, wait­ing on pins and nee­dles to hear back from col­leges, and won­der­ing why senior year has been the com­plete oppo­site of the idyl­lic year promised by year­books and teen movies. Am I right? Thought so.

I remem­ber you at sev­en­teen, about to start your senior year of high school as the new stu­dent at a pri­vate, Catholic school in the Los Ange­les. The ear­lier years of high school were a chal­lenge for you – your mother being diag­nosed with breast can­cer and con­stantly feel­ing out of place within the LAUSD school sys­tem. You had too many pas­sions and too lit­tle out­lets for them. Would col­lege be the solu­tion to your feel­ing out of place? Would col­lege allow you to make up for the social and extracur­ric­u­lar expe­ri­ences you missed out on, when you came home early to pro­vide sup­port to your mother because you could not bear to be out when some­one you loved so dearly was in such tremen­dous pain?

Write a let­ter to your high school self. Share the things you ques­tioned about col­lege that even­tu­ally were answered. Share your wis­dom and advice. Give some guid­ance to the next gen­er­a­tion of col­lege potentials.

The apple often doesn't fall far from the tree. We all know that adage. For bet­ter or for worse, our moms (and dads) make a big dif­fer­ence in our col­lege and career suc­cess. What to do if your par­ents were not well-educated or high up on the pro­fes­sional ladder.

How to turn that NO into a YES (sort of): Reject­ing Col­lege Rejections.

Bet­ter­Grads will be offer­ing four Col­lege 101 pan­els in Jan­u­ary 2010 at San Fran­cisco Bay Area High Schools, includ­ing Rich­mond High School and Oak­land Tech­ni­cal High School.

Col­lege rep­u­ta­tions are never a real­ity — or never a com­plete real­ity, at least. Prospec­tive col­lege stu­dents would be very well advised to spend less time "drink[ing] in the tour guide's every word" — on claims of Hog­warts or oth­er­wise — and more time ask­ing tough ques­tions, doing exten­sive research and intro­spec­tion, and, most impor­tantly, engag­ing as many cur­rent col­lege stu­dents and young pro­fes­sion­als for their insights and actual expe­ri­ences as they can.

As an exclu­sive for our blog read­ers, we'd like to share some of the early find­ings from the post-presentation sur­veys from our 7 pre­sen­ta­tions to over 600 stu­dents and par­ents at Granada High School in Liv­er­more, CA. Four-hundred and ninety-four fresh­men responded (of the 570 or so we addressed through the Fresh­men In Tran­si­tion (F.I.T.) pro­gram). The remain­der of the sur­vey responses came from stu­dents who attended our two panel dis­cus­sions at Col­lege Night, which involved 11th graders and their parents.

With many excit­ing recent devel­op­ments to share, includ­ing the first (inter)national Bet­ter­Grads team meet­ing, a pre­sen­ta­tion to the Rotary Club of Pleasan­ton North, upcom­ing pre­sen­ta­tions at Oak­land Tech, ini­tial feed­back from GHS, it’s time for another update on BetterGrads!