Читать книгу Accepted!. Secrets to Gaining Admission to the World's Top Universities онлайн

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Make sure all your subjects are ideally in a single curriculum or at most two. For example, doing IB and then some A Levels and then AP spreads your work too thinly and makes you look relatively worse. Going super hard on a given curriculum is going to result in a more remarkable comparison for top universities. This means you need to choose your high school and your curriculum carefully so you don't find yourself switching schools in the middle.

Finally, and somewhat cheekily, if possible, do not tell all your classmates about all your additional subjects (admittedly this is difficult in some schools where APs/ honors classes are populated by the same group of ambitious students). The whole point of this strategy is to take way more subjects than anyone else applying for the same universities.

In high school, I discussed my strategy with my closest friend and it resulted in that friend taking almost double the subjects they normally would. You don't want to create competition inflation by broadcasting publicly you are taking so many extra subjects, and then your classmates respond by taking more themselves. This effectively cancels out the benefit of your additional work as you no longer shine as bright relative to them. With college admissions, the less you can do to panic your classmates into taking more subjects, more exams, and more activities the better—that only creates more work for you! (I want to add here, however, that some of the best friends I have made are the ones who have challenged me to do better. So on that note, if you have a friend who stands out above the crowd, think about how you can use their example as inspiration for reaching your own potential.)