Grade by Grade: What 9th, 10th, and 11th Graders Should Actually Be Doing for College Admissions
Written by Sy Kim
Most families don't get serious about college admissions until junior year, or worse, that panicked fall of senior year when the Common App is already open and the clock is loudly, unhelpfully ticking. By then there's no time left to build anything new. The activities list is whatever managed to survive freshman and sophomore year, the essay gets written in a caffeinated blur, and the GPA trend has already been carved in stone.
The families who dodge that scramble aren't smarter or richer. They just started earlier, and they used each year of high school for what it's actually good for instead of cramming all four into one long senior-year sprint.
9th Grade: figure out what you actually care about
Freshman year isn't about building an impressive resume, and honestly, trying to look accomplished this early tends to backfire. Nobody expects much from a 14-year-old, least of all admissions officers, who have read enough applications to spot the difference between a kid who's genuinely into robotics and a kid whose parent signed them up for robotics.
The real job this year is exploration. Try a handful of things: a club, a sport, a volunteer role, a personal project, and pay attention to which ones you keep coming back to on your own, without anyone reminding you. That's the tell. Two or three activities you actually care about beat five you're dragging yourself to.
Academically, this is also the year GPA habits get set, whether you're paying attention or not, and some colleges do look at freshman transcripts. So it's worth building the basics now: a system for tracking assignments, a relationship with at least one teacher, and the nerve to take on one class that actually challenges you.
By the end of the year, a student should have a rough sense of what they're interested in and two or three activities worth continuing. Not a finished plan. Just a direction, which at 14 is genuinely plenty.
10th Grade: narrow down and start leading
Sophomore year is where the exploring from freshman year turns into commitment. Look honestly at everything you're involved in and cut what isn't going anywhere, even if quitting feels a little embarrassing. Depth in two or three activities reads far better on an application than a long list of things you barely showed up for.
This is the year to look for real responsibility, not just a nicer title on the same old job. Running for club president looks great on paper. It means a lot less if nothing actually changed while you held the gavel. What matters is whether you took on a project, made a decision, or built something that wouldn't exist without you: organizing an event, starting a small initiative inside a club you already belong to, tutoring other students, launching something entirely your own.
One habit worth starting now and keeping for the rest of high school: write things down as they happen. Numbers, outcomes, a thank-you email from a coach, a screenshot of something you made. By senior year, nobody remembers the exact details from sophomore year. The application, unfortunately, will still ask for them.
Summer after sophomore year is a good moment to actually launch something, whether that's a small project, a research effort, or a role with more responsibility, so there's something real to point to going into junior year, instead of a vague memory of good intentions.
11th grade: turn the work into a story, and lock the logistics
Junior year carries the most weight, both because it's the last full year of grades colleges see before most applications go in, and because this is when testing, recommendation letters, and the college list all collide at once.
Testing. Most students take the PSAT in the fall, use the results to see where the cracks are, and sit for their first real SAT or ACT in the spring, leaving room for a retake senior fall if the first one doesn't stick. Wait until senior year to start testing, and you've thrown away your own safety net.
Recommendation letters. These aren't earned in the week before they're due, no matter how nice the thank-you note is. They come from relationships built over time. The right moment to ask is toward the end of junior year, before teachers get buried under senior requests, and it helps enormously to hand them something concrete to work with, like a short list of what you've done and why you're applying where you are.
The college list. This is also the year a realistic list starts to take shape, balanced across schools where you're a strong bet, a reasonable match, and a genuine stretch. A list should reflect where you'd actually be happy landing, not just which names make people nod approvingly at dinner.
By now, a student should be able to say clearly what they've built and why it matters to them, in a sentence or two. That clarity doesn't come from one essay-writing session senior year, no matter how strong the coffee. It comes from having done things worth talking about, and having paid attention along the way to why they mattered.
Junior summer tends to be the highest-leverage stretch of the whole three years. It's the last real block of time before senior fall, and it's when a project, an internship, or a piece of research finally gets finished instead of just started, again.
The one idea that ties all three years together
Admissions officers read thousands of applications from students with strong GPAs, solid test scores, and full activity lists. What actually separates applicants isn't how many things a student did. It's whether there's a real thread connecting a few of them, backed up by specifics instead of titles.
Depth beats breadth almost every time. A leadership title is worth less than what actually changed because a student held it. And the strongest applications usually come from students who spent three years doing a handful of things they genuinely cared about, not four years collecting activities that might look good on paper but say nothing at all.
None of this requires an expensive summer program or a nonprofit founded specifically so it can go on an application (admissions officers can smell those from a mile away). It requires starting earlier than most students do, and being honest each year about what's working and what isn't.
Where to start
If your student is heading into 9th, 10th, or 11th grade and this whole thing feels like a fog, that's worth clearing up now, while there's still time to actually use the year. Book a planning call with LVL Prep, and we'll map out what matters most for their grade and goals.