Summer Steps for Rising Seniors
With the end of the school year almost upon us, plans for summer rise to the forefront. While summer is a chance to recalibrate and practice organizational and executive function skills for all students, rising seniors are in a unique position. Rising seniors will need to meet the familiar challenges of their last year in high school. But beyond that, the summer before senior year is a chance to begin preparing for the new challenges of college. Here are some ideas to take over the summer that will help with both:
Learn to productively manage free time. By now, students should have strategies and routines to manage their class and extracurricular activities during the school year. Summertime typically includes a lot more down time. Do you know what else includes a lot more down time? College semesters. Students in high school are used to having their schedules laid out from morning until afternoon, sometimes even through dinnertime and beyond. By contrast, college students will typically take 4 classes which will meet 2-3 times per week, meaning actual time spent in class is considerably less than anything they’ve experienced so far. Prevailing wisdom says that for every hour of class time, college students should also spend about 3 hours of study time. That means becoming accustomed to chunking out those unstructured hours for more than just social activities or gaming. Summer before senior year is a great time to practice.
Choose a book you’ve been meaning to read and set a schedule to complete it over the summer.
Take a summer class, even if it’s something online or for fun. Become accustomed to being present for the instruction (or setting a specific time to view the online content) and keeping up with the assignments. Doing something non-credit or just for fun means that slipping up doesn’t have dramatic consequences. But each challenge with managing the class together with other summer activities or even around a summer job is an opportunity to practice new strategies for when it will be important to do this independently.
Play around with time management apps. For students who are still using a planner, or who use Google calendar or another program exclusively, summer can be a good time to experiment in-depth with the variety of scheduling and time management tools available online and through apps on your phone. Having a full year to use these tools prior to entering college will be an advantage and can also be an added bonus to set up a successful senior year of high school.
Work on your college application essay. While many students wait until the beginning of their senior year to begin writing their essay, they don’t factor into account the difficulty of finding time to do their best work while simultaneously keeping up with classwork. Another thing many students don’t take into account is the shortened timeline if you plan to apply to a college using early decision or early action. Deadlines for early decision can be as soon as the first of November and are typically between November 1-15. While the Common App opens on August 1st, according to the commonapp.org blog, the Common App essay prompts will remain the same for 2025-2026. Why not have a thoughtful draft ready to go? If you need support with essay writing, EEG offers a summer class on college essay admission writing. We won’t write the essay for you, but will give you plenty of feedback to write a captivating narrative essay.
Let’s make this summer both fun and productive!