The College Strategy Most Families Wish They Had in 9th Grade

By junior year, a lot of families start looking backward.

Should we have taken that interest more seriously? Was that summer program actually worth it? Should they have started research earlier? Was there an activity they should have dropped two years ago?

The challenge is that many of the things that make a student’s high school experience distinctive take time to build.

A strong research project does not happen overnight. Neither does an engineering portfolio, a publication, a meaningful leadership role, or a business with real customers.

The earlier a student knows where they might want to go deeper, the more time they have to actually do something with it.

During this virtual event, we’ll show you what a thoughtful high school strategy can look like before senior year.

You’ll get a live look at The FlightPlan, a college strategy platform from Curious Cardinals, and see how it uses a student’s academics, extracurriculars, interests, goals, grade level, and school context to create a personalized roadmap.

We’ll cover questions like:

• What should a 9th grader be exploring right now?
• When should a student start going deeper on an interest?
• Which activities should they bolster, maintain, or cut?
• When does research make sense?
• When is an internship actually worthwhile?
• Which competitions, publications, awards, or projects could be a good fit?
• How should students think about summers before junior and senior year?
• What should they be working toward over the next month, semester, and year?

The goal is not to turn freshman year into a college admissions campaign.

It is to give students enough direction that they can explore what they genuinely care about, recognize when something has real potential, and have enough time to take it somewhere meaningful.

Curious Cardinals students have gone on to publish research, win major competitions, build award-winning apps, launch businesses and nonprofits, earn recognition for their writing, and present work to organizations like NASA.

Most of those accomplishments started long before senior year.

You’ll leave with a clearer picture of what is worth thinking about earlier, what can wait, and how to help your student make the most of the years they still have ahead of them.