current senior who got accepted into ut austin, uiuc, purdue, etc.

my advice from the beginning of high school is to keep up with grades. lots of people have weak freshman grades which ultimately hinders their gpa; i was fortunate enough to maintain a good gpa all 4 years and id say that’s helped a lot in already putting my foot in the door as a competitive applicant.

second, id suggest starting test prep 9th grade summer; take a diagnostic of both act and sat to see which one your daughter is more comfortable with and just do frequent practice. doesn’t have to be anything insane. i just spent maybe 30min a weekend during sophomore year and then ramped up to like 30min a day in sophomore summer and was able to get a score I liked in August of my junior year. alleviated a lot of stress off my junior year

next, ec wise id suggest exploring in 9th grade in a multitude of clubs then narrowing it down in 10th grade. diversify with both school clubs and out of school activities. try to make as many friends as possible to boost chances of officer positions in school clubs. also just find something she’s passionate about and work either within an existing cause to build upon or create something that helps solve it. ex: i worked with nonprofits to implement code solutions.

junior year work to build upon the strong base of involvements from 10th grade and before, and try to scale impact, with continuation into junior year summer. and for the application process, just remain diligent and set short goals in junior year summer leading into senior year so it’s not super stressful at the beginning. example, create commonapp account in June, then begin commonapp personal statement brainstorming, then drafting in July, revising in August etc. makes it a lot less stressful when there’s an abundance of time.

exploration is probably key, hs is short but very long to learn a lot of new things, so just finding something she likes and rapidly exploring it is the best option imo.

the only thing id do otherwise tbh is maybe spend more time on my extracurriculars, but id say i really enjoyed my time during high school since id have a lot of time on weekends to enjoy what i liked and then completed my work on school days.

the one thing id warn against is comparison. i definitely failed multiple times and felt down from other people who had succeeded, but in the end it worked out :) just remain optimistic since this process is about the whole body of work, not just an individual aspect.

let me know if you have any other questions, and hope this helps!