This past spring, U.S. News visited La Jolla High School in the San Diego Unified School District to ask several seniors who had recently gone through the college application process and were then weighing their options for lessons learned along the way — and their best tips for high school students just getting started.
Set in a postcard-perfect seaside community, La Jolla High is a comprehensive high school serving about 1,650 students. Because of the district’s emphasis on school choice, students from an array of San Diego neighborhoods attend La Jolla.
The school provides Advanced Placement courses in 21 curricular areas; 98 percent of students graduate, on average, and 70 percent go on to four-year colleges (about 22 percent go to a two-year school). White students comprise 56 percent of the student body, with Hispanics, Asians and African-Americans accounting for most of the rest.
Kurt Rustin is going to Northern Arizona University for mechanical engineering, hoping “to one day be an inventor” and hold his own patents. The track-and-field star and kayaker chose NAU for “its many labs that are about using your building skills, not just classroom smarts” because he considers himself to be more of a learn-by-doing kind of guy.
“Learning on the job is definitely something I’m better at,” he says.
Rustin didn’t let ADHD and dyslexia hold him back, getting tutoring and extra help to succeed in AP and other challenging courses. He pursued his engineering interests by working as a hydroplane boat mechanical crew trainee and helping the Maritime Museum of San Diego build a full-scale replica of the Spanish galleon San Salvador. He also built La Jolla High’s Latin department website.
Rustin applied to 12 schools and got into almost all, including California Polytechnic State University, Colorado School of Mines and the University of Colorado–Boulder.
Bucknell University in Pennsylvania turned him down. He seriously considered CalPoly and Purdue University in Indiana, but had the impression they were more classroom-based than “hands-on” NAU.
GPA: 3.8 unweighted
ACT score: 31 composite
Extracurriculars: Track team captain, robotics team, La Jolla High garden club, flat water and ocean kayaking
Essay: Most of his schools didn’t require an essay. Responding to one prompt asking what three items he would want with him if stranded in a foreign land, he explained why he would pick a machete, the American flag and a family photo album.
Research tip: On family road trips to areas he liked, he’d look up nearby colleges. “I’m a location guy,” he says, who thinks Flagstaff is beautiful.
Key realization: Learning shouldn’t be a contest, so he didn’t want to go to a school with “too much competition.”
Great perk: While Rustin is an out-of-stater, he will pay tuition and fees of $14,000, about the halfway point between what in-state and out-of-state residents pay, thanks to being in one of the states in the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education’s Western Undergraduate Exchange.
Biggest surprise: “I only had to write two essays to apply to 12 colleges.”
Advice: “Try to listen to yourself more than others.”
This story is excerpted from the U.S. News “Best Colleges 2015” guidebook, which features in-depth articles, rankings and data.
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