Spring Cleaning

With the school year coming to an end and the rapid approach of your upcoming exams, you may decide to do some "spring cleaning" of your school materials. As you go through your bookbags and homework/ study areas there are a few things to keep in mind. Does your system work for you? Are you able to find everything you want and need without having to search? Do you spend more time organizing and looking for the piece of paper that you know has the answer than you do actually completing the project or assignment? Do you know what you want or need to save for the future? And yes, I am talking about more than just digging out of your room in case your parents decide to convert your room into a guest bedroom after you go to college... :-)

Keeping your notes organized and any study guides, equation summary sheets, as well as old tests and quizzes in a way that will allow you to pull upon that information in the future is very important. I can tell you from my experience in college, if I had not saved my notes from calculus in high school then there is no way I would have passed that class in college! Your notes can often be the most useful resource (assuming you take good notes each day) because you are re-writing the main topics in your own words and organizing the information in a manner that makes sense to you. Old study guides, tests and quizzes are all very useful when trying to study for an upcoming exam.

So, take a little time now to prepare for your upcoming final exams and (for the seniors) for college when you might want or need this information by getting organized today. If you need help with talking about some better strategies for organizing your materials, feel free to stop in and we can talk about some different ideas to see if one of them sounds like it could work for you.

CC+ Transcripts

If you are a senior who took College Credit Plus (CC+) classes through CSCC or COTC last year or this year, you need to be sure that you request for your CSCC and/ or COTC transcripts to be sent to your future college.

If you are going to continue at Columbus State, then you don't have to do anything with your CSCC transcript (they already have that), but you would need to send them your COTC transcript.

If you are going to a 4 year college, then you will need to send them both transcripts... and yes, this is in addition to us at WKHS sending them your final high school transcript.

We have posted the links for how to send your CC+ transcripts on the Counselor website so if this is something that applies to you, please be sure to request them to be sent.  

ACT My Answer Key

One of the features that ACT offers, but SAT does not is the option to sign up to receive your test questions and answers for particular tests. They used to call this Test Information Release, but now it is simply called, the ACT My Answer Key.

Students can use this option on the October, April and June test dates. There is a $36 fee to sign up for this option.

Part of the reason that I am pointing this out now is that the deadline to sign up for the June ACT test date is coming up on Friday. So, if you are planning to take the June ACT and would potentially use your test answers to help you review for any future test attempts that you make, signing up to get the My Answer Key is a great way to make sure you can better understand your test strengths and work to build on those while also improving on any areas of weakness.

National College Decision Day

Seniors, by now you should all be well aware of the fact that tomorrow, Friday, May 1st, is national college decision day. The colleges are all united in the fact that they will not require you to make decisions about where you will attend prior to May 1st, but this is one of the deadlines that is firm.

As you are aware, throughout the college application process each college has their own timeline and often have different application deadlines, financial aid deadlines, and announce their admission decisions at different times, but May 1st is a universal deadline among all colleges requiring students to declare their decision. Please remember this not only means that you have informed the college of your choice that you intend to attend their college, but it also typically includes submitting a deposit.

As you reach the final hours of your decision making window, if you need to talk out your choice with someone, please feel free to stop in and talk to us. Remember to trust yourself. You will make the decision that is right for you!

Next Year's Schedule

Mrs. Travis (in partnership with the rest of the WKHS administrators) has been working on the master schedule for next year. They have determined where each class will be held during the school day to meet the most student requests possible. This includes running your requests through the computer to try to match as many of the requests as possible between what you had asked for and what is possible in the computers. As of this week, they have officially "locked" the master schedule into place. 

Unfortunately, now that the schedule is locked it becomes crazy for the counselors as we go through each of the schedules that didn't match and try to figure out if there is a solution and what possible options we can use to make a schedule fit together. We will spend hours pouring over schedules and will have to call down some of you to talk about back up choices based upon the conflicts in your schedule. This is never easy and we know it is disappointing when you don't get all of the classes that you wanted, so we promise that we are doing the best we can to make everything work together.

We are starting the process of calling kids down regarding conflicts. If in the coming days, you get an email or pass to come see us during your lunch, off period or between periods, we are asking you to please make every effort to come at the day and time we are calling for you so we can look at your schedule together. (And that specific timing is when we think we should be able to fit you in without making you wait for long.) You don't want us to be the one to make those tough choices for you so we really do need to meet and look at the options together.

Inevitably, when everyone hears that the schedule is locked, students will be curious about the schedule and what their classes will look like for next year. We are more than happy to talk about this with you, but not until all of the conflicts are resolved. So, we ask you to please be patient with us and wait until the last week of school (week of exams) to try to come and get a sneak peek at what your schedule will hopefully be for next year. (Full disclosure though, all schedules are 100% up for revision and changes based on whatever has to happen with the master schedule as the summer progresses.)

Making College Lists

Having a good, solid, balanced, reasonable college list that meets your needs academically, socially and financially is an essential part of the college application process. Juniors, it is time for you to be actively working on building that perfect (for you) college list.

To support students and parents in this process we have a Junior Seminar coming up this week focused on building your college lists.

On Thursday, April 30th, we will host the final Junior Seminar of this year in Room 201 from 8:15-8:35am to talk about finalizing your college list.

We hope you will make plans to join us on Thursday!

AP and IB Exams

Over the next few weeks many WKHS students will be taking Advanced Placement and IB Exams. The AP and IB exams are held on designated days and will be in varying locations. I know many of you have been spending an extraordinary amount of time studying to prepare for the exams. Good Luck!  You will do great! Remember, you have spent the whole year learning all of the content that you need to know in order to take the tests to hopefully earn the college credit. 

Additionally, I want to remind you that IB exams begin at 8:30am and AP exams start at 8:00am. That means all students who will be taking AP tests next week need to make arrangements to arrive to school by 7:30am for morning AP tests. You will then get checked in and ready to go for testing to start promptly at 8:00am. Since this is different than our typical normal schedule you will want to make sure you have a plan for getting to school because the buses won't have you to school on time.  Also, since that is an hour earlier than you are probably arriving to school normally, it wouldn't be a bad idea to start waking up a little earlier so that your body (and brain) is prepared for the earlier start next week.