 What's happening guys? It's Shane here and today we're going to be talking about how to actually prepare for college. So you might be watching this video, maybe you're in high school, you're a freshman, you're a sophomore, a junior, a senior, maybe you just graduated from high school, or maybe you decided to take a little bit of time off after graduating. You're somebody who decided to go right into the workforce, but you're thinking about going back to college. You've decided that you want to play the game of loans. How do you prepare yourself for that? So in this video, I'm going to start off as early as possible, tell you what you can do if you're somebody who's like in middle school, or if you're a freshman or a sophomore in high school, then I'm going to move on to what you should be doing if you're a junior, then a senior, and then what you should be doing if you are somebody who has already graduated high school. But before we get into that, make sure to gently tap that like button for the YouTube algorithm and hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell if you haven't done it already. Most people on the channel, I think only like 18%, I think right now, I'll have that pop up right now of people who watch my videos, don't actually subscribe and hit the notification bell. What's going on guys? Make sure you're doing that. All right. So first, let's say you are somebody who hasn't even started high school yet. What are you doing? Go play video games or something. Why are you even watching these videos? Just kidding. If you're somebody who hasn't even started high school yet, you're already thinking about college. Why are you even thinking about college? College is just that thing that you see in the movies on like American pie where people go to party, right? That's probably what you think college is. Welcome to college boys. Just kidding. If you're somebody who's looking that far ahead, that's awesome. I definitely wasn't looking that far ahead when I was in middle school, but if you're doing that, that's awesome. Welcome to my channel. This is a great place to be. But honestly, even if you're like a freshman or a sophomore in high school and you're watching these videos, you're doing this research, you are way ahead of the curve. So I'm going to start there. Let's say you're watching this and you're like either before high school, a freshman or a sophomore, I'm going to group all of those people together and we're going to talk about what you should be doing right now in order to get the most out of your college experience and basically how to prepare yourself to do that. Now, first of all, let's talk about scholarships. There are scholarships that are only available to people who are in middle school. There are scholarships that are only available to people who are freshmen in high school. Same thing with sophomores. A lot of people don't realize this, but there are scholarships that are available specifically to those people. So if you're a junior or a senior, you cannot apply to some of these scholarships that are only available to freshmen. So you should definitely be taking advantage of that. Look up scholarships online, check with your school counselor, ask them what scholarships are available to whatever you happen to be in right now, right? Whatever phase of your life you're in. They are rare. There's not a lot of them around, but you should definitely look into them. Another thing you should be looking into at this point when you're a freshman or a sophomore in high school is how you can get the most out of high school itself. So I talk about this extensively in other videos. I also go over this in great detail in my college 101 course, which you can find down in the description below. But basically there are many ways for you to either graduate high school early or get college credit while you're still in high school. And by doing this, what that's going to allow you to do is you're going to be able to graduate college early. That's going to save you time. First of all, it's going to save you a lot of money. College is on average about $80,000 total. And people go on average about $40,000 in debt to get a bachelor degree. So if you're able to shave a year off, boom, you saved yourself $20,000 right there. If you're able to save two years off, you might have saved yourself $40,000 there. But on top of that, you're going to be saving yourself time and more importantly, opportunity costs. So if you are able to graduate two years earlier with your bachelor degree, all of your friends are still going to be going to college for those extra two years while you are going to be earning money. Money, money, money, right? So they're going to be paying money to the college in order to attend it. While you are going to be earning money and also on top of that, getting real life work experience. Now, if you are somebody who specifically wants to try to graduate high school early, I think you do have to start thinking about that and your freshman or sophomore year. And like I said, there are a lot of different options for how you can graduate college early. But if that's the specific one that you're trying to do, you do have to kind of start thinking about that and start planning things very early on. And the reason for that is a lot of the time, there's a class, you know, like you have to take X class before Y class and Y class before Z class. And these are all required for you to graduate high school. And so you really want to talk to your high school counselor and kind of like make a map or a plan for you to be able to graduate early. Very common to see people graduate a semester early or even a year early. Another option you might be able to consider at this stage is starting to take what are known as AP classes or IB classes, that's advanced placement or international baccalaureate. And then after you take those classes, you would take exams, for instance, with AP, you take an exam, usually very difficult, you have to score at least a three in order to get college credit with some colleges, even higher than that. If you are a gifted student, sometimes there are very special programs where you can skip a lot of classes or test out of them. That's definitely something that you should look into as well. Now to be honest with you, a lot of the options that are going to be available in your junior and senior year are not available to you in your freshman or sophomore year. So for instance, a lot of scholarships really you're not going to start applying for them until your junior or senior year, I would say the vast majority of them. And on top of that, a lot of the programs that are available for you to get college credit won't be available until your junior or senior year as well. But with that being said, one thing that you can do that's going to help you a tremendous amount in high school, especially early on in high school, is getting good grades. Okay, I'm probably going to sound like a parent here. Okay, I'm sorry if I sound like your parent, but you will listen to me. Getting good grades helps tremendously in high school. First of all, it's going to help you get scholarships. It's so much easier to get scholarships if you get good grades. Some of the biggest and easiest to get scholarships that universities offer, basically all they require is that you have really good grades and then you do well on the ACT or the SAT. Sometimes they only require one or the other. I'm going to tell you right now that it may seem kind of difficult, but after you've gone to college, you're going to look back on your high school classes and you're going to think they are super easy. And it's not because you aren't smart, it's just because you haven't really taken those harder classes yet. And as you take harder classes, you grow as a person and you realize that it's not that difficult. The situation you're in right now really isn't that difficult. So it's absolutely worth it for you to try and get really good grades in high school. Now funny enough, not really going to go into this too much. A lot of the times in college, getting good grades doesn't matter all that much. I mean, you do have to get decent grades, but in high school, getting good grades is going to help you out a lot. So a few things you can do that are really going to help you out later on down the line is one, plan your classes out strategically, making sure that you're taking the right classes at the right time so that you can try to graduate early. And then the second thing is to get really good grades. Try to get perfect grades if possible. Sometimes you can take like AP classes or advanced classes and you can get even above a 4.0. But yeah, do whatever it takes in order to get perfect grades. Now I'm going to say this, if you're somebody watching this, you're like a junior or senior, you don't have perfect grades. It's okay, not the end of the world. All I'm saying is some of the lowest hanging fruit, the easiest scholarships that you can possibly get and the biggest ones where you only have to apply to one scholarship, and it's pretty much a guarantee that you're going to get it as long as you have certain grades and a certain score on a test or sometimes just one or the other, is going to be these scholarships that schools offer. And a lot of the time, these scholarships are going to be like $5,000, $10,000 per semester. So they basically pay for nearly all of your college expenses as long as you don't go to like a really expensive college. Now let's move on to your junior year of high school. So this is where you really want to start focusing on applying to scholarships. So there's a lot of scholarships out there. Sometimes they're going to be local scholarships that are just within your community. Sometimes they're going to be scholarships that are just at your school that you will start applying for around your junior year. And not only scholarships, but there's also essay contests on top of that. To get more detail on this, you can watch my video where I talk about how to pay for college. I go over in great detail about how to apply to these different essay contests as well as scholarships. But basically this is where you can start really getting ahead of everybody else because usually people don't start applying for scholarships until their senior year. So right before your junior year, you should start looking at these different scholarships and essay contests. And you're going to notice that a lot of them have very similar prompts, right? So many of the scholarships will require essays and then obviously the essay contests are going to require essays, but a lot of the time the prompts are going to be very similar. Now tell me about a time in your life where you experienced adversity and you were able to overcome that, something along those lines. And so you can basically make kind of like a template for the type of essay that you would submit to these. And so you're not going to have to write a new essay for every single scholarship you apply to. You can basically just copy, paste, change a few things here and there and apply to different scholarships that way. Plagiarism is a pretty serious charge, are you sure? It's not plagiarism because it's your own essay. And at this point you should start looking into the school you want to go to, the degree that you want to get, as well as the career path you want to go down. Now you don't have to make your decision up at this point, but you really should start looking. This involves doing research online of course, watching videos like my videos, looking at different websites like BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, figuring out what your passions are, what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, doing basic level research on different careers that you might want to go down. And another thing that I think you should highly consider, especially if you're somebody who has their grades down, like you're getting really good grades and you find yourself with extra time, is I think you should really highly consider getting a job. Now a lot of the time this is going to be a very basic entry level job. And I think there's a lot of value in doing that as early as possible. Even if you plan on being an entrepreneur in the future, like you plan on being a manager, a boss, a CEO, an entrepreneur, I think that it's going to be something where you're going to have a lot more empathy for your employees because you're somebody who has been in those entry level positions, even if it's a job that kind of sucks, you're going to have that perspective. And I can't say enough about that, like having the perspective of somebody who's in an entry level position, even if it's the worst job you ever have, at least you kind of have like a bar that's been set. And so you're going to feel really lucky when you get yourself into a good job. And you're going to know that's a good job because you know what a bad job looks like. But a lot of the time you're not going to have that bad of an experience. It's just going to be a pretty good experience. You're going to earn money and you're going to learn the basics of professionalism, you know, being there on time and you know, work culture and all of those things that you really can't learn about until you actually do it. There's a lot of soft skills that you're going to learn that you could never learn by reading a book or watching videos or anything like that. You just simply have to do it. It's kind of like riding a bicycle. There's no way for you to learn how to ride a bicycle until you actually get on the bike and try to ride it. You could read every book on riding a bicycle, you could watch every video, hire, you know, the world class expert on riding, like Lance Armstrong, something along those lines. But until you actually hop on the bike and try to ride it, you're not going to be able to learn how to do it. And the same thing goes for a lot of these soft skills that you learn when you get a job. And it's also nice to have a little bit of extra money as well. Now, usually this is just going to be a part-time job. You might just do like one shift a week, one shift every two weeks, something along those lines, but trust me, it's going to be worth it for you. Now, another thing you should look into at this point if you're a junior in high school, especially if you're somebody who wants to go to like an Ivy League school, something along those lines like you're a very ambitious person is doing something unique, something that you can put on your transcript and write about in your college essays that is going to really impress a lot of these upper-level colleges. So what a lot of ambitious people do is they basically do like all the extracurriculars. So they're taking like three different sports. They're joining debate, forensics, all these different clubs, they're getting all these leadership positions. And what ends up happening is they string themselves out so much that they don't really accomplish all that much in any of them. What's much better for you to do if you're one of these ambitious people, like I said, you don't have to do this if you just want to go to college like a normal person, but if you're trying to go to like an Ivy League school, you're a very ambitious person, is maybe do one or two of them. So like one sport and maybe one other thing that's kind of very creative and specific to you, specific to your passions. And then with the sport, maybe you become a team captain, you win a state championship, you do something that's outstanding. And then with the thing that's very specific to you, maybe you start a new organization at your school, you become the president of that organization, and then you accomplish something within that organization. Very, very important. That last part's very important because anybody can become a president of an organization, but you want to be able to talk about exactly what you accomplished while you were in that leadership position. So for instance, this is an example of one thing that I did while I was in college is I helped to actually create a scholarship while I was getting my doctorate degree in pharmacy when I was living in Henderson, Nevada, which is basically Las Vegas, Nevada. So I helped to create a scholarship for the local community. It was the drug abuse awareness that had to do with drug abuse. People would write an essay about drug abuse and, you know, things that have to do with that. And then we would pick the best essay and give that person a scholarship. So that's something that I actually accomplished while I was in the position. I didn't just do the day-to-day tasks that you're supposed to do. You did something extra and that is what colleges are looking for. They don't just want somebody who goes through the motions and does the bare minimum. They want somebody who does the extra stuff, right? They go the extra mile, they create something new, they create something unique. So this is something that you should think about starting to do when you're like a junior or a senior in high school. Now, moving on to when you are a senior in high school, this is very similar to when you're a junior, but it's just there's a few little differences. First of all, when it comes to scholarships and essay contests, you should definitely be filling these out. Like this is basically free money. A lot of the time schools, for instance, high schools will offer scholarships and pretty much nobody applies to them. So if you apply to them and you don't even write a good essay or anything, it's just basically free money. So you want to be figuring out the scholarships to apply to, apply to a bunch of them, get a system down for how to do that, which I talked about in the other video. And you're going to be getting tons of free money. At this point, you should really be getting a good idea at what schools you want to go to as well. And you should also be progressing on what degree you want to pick. And the degree that you want to pick is going to have a lot to do with what career you're going for. So what I always recommend on this channel is look into the careers, do a lot of research on the careers, and then go backwards from there, right? So reverse engineer the steps you need to take in order to get to that career. And there's like surface level research that you can do, which I talk about in a lot of my videos. But when you get it down to kind of like a smaller list, like maybe three different careers you're looking at, you really want to reach out to people who are in that career, right? Reach out to them, ask them questions that you just cannot get from the internet. Unfortunately, you know, the internet is kind of just general information. You need to get specific information that is tailored to you. So you want to talk to people who are currently doing that career and ask them what their advice is on how you should go into getting into that career, as well as if you should get into the career. Also as a junior and especially as a senior, there are a ton of different opportunities out there for you. First of all, you could graduate early. Generally, you have to kind of start that off earlier on in your freshman or sophomore year, but that's one option. There's also dual enrollment. That's where you basically take high school classes and college classes at the same time. So you're taking a college class, but you get college and high school credit for it. And the opportunities out there for you are going to be different depending on, you know, the state you live in, the community you live in, the school you go to, et cetera. Washington, for instance, has what's known as the running start program where you can take college classes in your junior and senior year of high school and you could theoretically knock out basically two years of college right there. That also looks really good when you're applying to different colleges. If they've seen that you're already taking college classes, that's going to look really good to them because they know that you're going to be ready for that. Now along with the AP and IB exams that you might be taking in order to knock some of those classes out, you can also start taking exams that are called CLEP. And that stands for the college level examination program. So there are these CLEP exams that you can take in order to get college credit. At this time, there's around 34 exams total that you can take. And most of these are kind of the entry level classes that you would be taking at your freshman and your sophomore year of college. And you can basically just knock those out while you're still in high school. Next, let's talk about what you can do if you are a graduate, right? You're somebody who's already graduated high school, maybe you already started your career, but you're thinking about going back to college. Well, first of all, you want to make sure that you have a plan. You don't want to go back to college if you don't already know kind of what career you're going for. Once you know what career you're going for, you can kind of reverse engineer those steps, go to college. What you should do is consider going to a community college, first of all, because they're much cheaper than universities. You can get those first two years done, transfer all of those credits to university, and then do the last two years. You can also look into different accelerated programs where maybe instead of four years, you can get the degree done in two or three years. I've talked about this before on the channel, but Western Governor University for certain types of degrees is a great option for that. There are videos here on YouTube of people getting their WGU degrees in one to two years, degrees that would normally take four. You can also take CLEP exams in your free time before you begin college. That can shave sometimes one or even like one and a half years off of your college degree length. Then you should also still try to apply for scholarships because there's some scholarships that are specifically for people who are not in high school. Basically, any situation you're in, there's going to be scholarships that apply to that specific situation and you should be applying for those. Now once you've started college, you're actually in college. The first thing you should do is you want to make a plan. You want to map out the exact classes that you need to take in order to get that degree. Then you need to figure out what classes you need to take first. So I've talked about this before, but sometimes you have to take X class before Y class and Y class before Z class. You need to figure out exactly what those classes are, which ones you have to take first. And then once you've done that, I really just recommend making an excel sheet or a Google Sheets sheet and figure out the exact classes you want to take at the exact time. Some universities are extremely sketchy and a degree that should take four years and honestly, in many cases even less than four years, they will drag that out and you'll end up spending five years, six years, sometimes even seven years to get a bachelor's degree. Now unless you're taking engineering and you change your major a couple of times, that is totally unacceptable. You should not be taking seven years to get your bachelor's degree. If that's the case, there's a very good chance that your college is one of those that are kind of sketchy because obviously if somebody takes longer to get the bachelor degree, that means the college is getting more money. I also think during this time, it's a very good idea for you to get a job while you're in college because realistically, employers care a lot more about work experience than they do about like the extracurriculars you did or the grades you got in most cases. There are some exceptions to that, especially if you're trying to go to graduate school for instance, but in most cases people are going to care way more about your work experience. Another point is to continue applying for scholarships while you're still in college. There are scholarships that are only available to freshmen in college, sophomores in college, juniors in college, seniors in college. I think you get the idea here. You should always be applying for scholarships pretty much no matter what point you are in your educational journey, even if you're in graduate school. And if you've been applying all along for these types of scholarships, it's going to be ridiculously easy for you because you've already written so many essays that all you have to do is just copy paste and then just change a few things here and there based on what the prompt is and you're good to go. So instead of a scholarship taking an hour or two for you to apply to, it's probably going to take like 10 or 15 minutes. All right, that's all I have for you in this video. Again, this was very surface level. I couldn't really dive very deep into these concepts. This is something that I dive very deeply onto in my college 101 course, as well as other videos on my channel. So definitely check those out. But if you haven't already, go ahead gently tap the like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera that you have on the video, as well as things that you think that I might have missed. Comment all of that down below and I will see you guys next time.