This past spring, U.S. News visited La Jolla High School in the San Diego Unified School District to ask several seniors who had recently gone through the college application process and were then weighing their options for lessons learned along the way — and their best tips for high school students just getting started.
Set in a postcard-perfect seaside community, La Jolla High is a comprehensive high school serving about 1,650 students. Because of the district’s emphasis on school choice, students from an array of San Diego neighborhoods attend La Jolla.
The school provides Advanced Placement courses in 21 curricular areas; 98 percent of students graduate, on average, and 70 percent go on to four-year colleges (about 22 percent go to a two-year school). White students comprise 56 percent of the student body, with Hispanics, Asians and African-Americans accounting for most of the rest.
Luis Galvan is a first – generation college student, headed to the University of California–Berkeley to study biochemistry in hopes of becoming a doctor. With money tight and his mother supporting seven, Galvan was greatly aided by a program called Reality Changers, a San Diego nonprofit that provides youth from disadvantaged backgrounds with academic support, leadership training and assistance with application costs.
Galvan credits the program — which also helped arrange an internship with a University of California–San Diego researcher working on fortifying proteins against viruses — for his landing at Berkeley and becoming a Gates Millennium Scholar. The Gates program will cover tuition and living expenses for his undergrad degree and for graduate degrees in certain disciplines.
Galvan got into several California state schools but was turned down by Harvard University , Yale University , Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania.
GPA: 3.9 unweighted
SAT/ACT scores: 630 math; 570 critical reading; 510 writing/26 composite
Extracurriculars: Fight Against Cancer Club; Reality Changers ambassador in the community; volunteer on community landscaping projects and at a soup kitchen
Essay: He drew an analogy between his internship and his performance as a student.
Big push: He figures he logged 350 hours applying to colleges and for the Gates program. With the help of Reality Changers, he reworked his Gates essay 20 times.
Regret: Putting the college essays off. It would have been better to “do a little — one hour — each day.”
Heads-up: He found the College Scholarship Service Profile more challenging than the FAFSA.
A dvice: Get involved in clubs freshman year so you can become an officer as a senior.
This story is excerpted from the U.S. News “Best Colleges 2015” guidebook, which features in-depth articles, rankings and data.
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