This month, several of my devotionals about time management are being featured on CBN.com so I thought you might appreciate a practical follow up specifically about how to structure your time during high school for maximum effect.

Paradoxically, the first thing on the list needs to be: remaining flexible and available to God as He brings unexpected opportunities into our lives. Our second daughter, Anne, was knocking down the academic benchmarks almost as fast as we could put them out there, but she wasn’t sure of a post-high school direction. Then she was asked to compose, conduct and engineer the music for a short film. Composing hadn’t been the favorite aspect of her musical training. However, she made it her policy to “just say yes” when God brought her opportunities that wouldn’t detract from things she already had on her plate. So she decided to give it a try. She finished the composing aspect within two breathless weeks, discovering in the process, that when she had an actual reason beyond the “assignment for the week”, she truly loved composing. Remaining available to God may be vital to discovering His calling on a young person’s life.

So here is the general outline:

Freshman Year

• Pray specifically for direction and begin to consider what the student is called to become.
• Agree as a family about graduation requirements: include goals in academics, entrepreneurship, apprenticeship, and public service. (See especially the section on School Profiles in the Countdown to College Guide)
• Plot them out over the four years on your planning pages from the Guide or the e-Forms disk
• Plan the costs of your activities and academics.  Plan how you will cover them and which costs the student will bear himself.
• Begin to develop friendships with adults who can become mentors and recommenders by the end of the high school period.
• Register on FastWeb and other search engines, so that you can begin to apply for early scholarship money.
• If entrepreneurship is one of the things you plan to pursue, start your first business now.

Sophomore Year

• Take a practice PSAT exam, if your student is academically gifted. (PSATs won’t prepare you for the SAT, but they will qualify you for National Merit Scholarships, if you score high enough)
• Take practice SAT and ACT exams even if you don’t plan to go to college.  Often students discover they want to go to college later.  Standard exams like these will help to validate their transcripts later on, and are often considered more reliable measures of what the student has achieved than her GPA is.
• Adjust your 4-year plan to accommodate new opportunities and set-backs.
• Continue to pray, to develop adult friendships and to monitor scholarship search engines.
• Dream about colleges. Research programs that interest the student. (Try the ISI Guide to Choosing the Right College)
• Plan to visit colleges, if at all possible.
  
• If college is not your destination, dream about the opportunities you would like to pursue.  Begin to look for ways to try things out: apprenticeships, shadowing professionals in your field of interest, etc.  Negotiate an apprenticeship for next fall.
• Try a community college class or online distance college or AP classes.
• Take a slightly heavier load academically this year in order to have plenty of time next year for applying for scholarships and colleges.  Make sure you have core academics on track so that you won’t be blindsided by the standard college entrance exams next year.

Junior Year (Fall)

• Take PSAT, SAT and ACT exams.
• Pray and adjust your 4-year plan.
• Take a slightly heavier academic load now, in order to leave time next semester for scholarship application.
• If you are a bit behind, you can halve your time in class by taking the subject at community college.
• If you are doing a Junior year apprenticeship, start now, so that by spring, you have hit your stride.
• Visit colleges.
• Prepare School Profile, Course Descriptions, and update transcript and resume.
• Recruit recommenders for scholarships, college applications and job applications.

Junior Year (Spring)

• Set aside 15 – 20 hours/week to apply for colleges & scholarships.
• Take a slightly lighter academic schedule.
• Re-take SAT and/or ACT if you want to improve your scores.

Senior Year (Fall)

• Continue to spend 15-20 hours/week applying for scholarships, etc. This is the last big push for this.  Most major scholarships have deadlines November to January of the senior year.
• Final opportunity to improve SAT and ACT scores.
• Plan graduation celebrations.  Send notices to close friends & relations to save the date.
• Practice interview skills.  Major scholarships, jobs and colleges all require interviews.

Senior Year (Spring)

• Prepare for interviews.
• Apply for college financial aid.  College-based financial aid is awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. So you’ll need tax forms, FAFSA and CSS Profiles completed as soon as possible in January and February.
• Resume normal academic load.
• Prepare the mid-year report for colleges, as soon as fall grades have been calculated.
• Complete graduation plans.
• Develop strategies for maintaining relationships and providing support if the student is going away after graduation.
• Give thanks for what God brings and for what He has done!

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Learn to  acquire the credentials you’ll need for launching into life, and to prepare the paperwork that will validate your achievements in Countdown to College: the Homeschoolers’ Guide to Winning Scholarships.

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