First, there’s absolutely no need to freak out if you’re not the valedictorian or salutatorian of your high school.

Did you know that the majority of students admitted to Harvard and Stanford aren’t valedictorian, either?

Here’s what you need to know about your high school GPA and class rank to get into any Ivy League school:

1) It’s ok to have a poor freshman year GPA. What’s important is to show an UPWARD TREND – improvement over time

2) As important as your GPA is your transcript and the classes you take. Be sure to take the HARDEST CLASSES AVAILABLE – APs, IB, etc

3) Make your junior year count. It’s the one that Admissions Committees focus the most on – you want your best grades in this year

4) Don’t forget about your SAT score. It counts as much (and sometimes even more) than your high school grades

5) As long as you’re in the top 5% of your high school class, you’ll be fine – this varies by school so if you’re at an easy school, the bar will be higher

By no means am I recommending you do just the BARE MINIMUM. You should always aim to be valedictorian.

I went through this process awhile back and was accepted to 6 Ivy League schools and Stanford, so I speak from experience about this process. I wrote a book on college admissions tips called Hopeless to Harvard.

Follow my 5 critical steps above, and you’ll be a strong candidate. Focus your energies on your passions – whether that’s sports, science, or social studies.

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What kind of stories am I going to tell here? Well how about the time a thought I’d blinded our oldest daughter? (Honest it has a happy ending.) How about the Christmas when we’d not to kindly told my sister not to get us a puppy because we didn’t want to be tied down that much. It was around New Years that we came to realize we were pregnant with aforementioned daughter #1.

Maybe I’ll manage to share a little wisdom in amongst it all. After all, all four kids are well on their way to adulthood, Gale and I are still on speaking terms most days, and I haven’t feared homelessness being around the next corner in quite some time. All that has got to count for something beyond dumb luck, doesn’t it?

Speaking of homelessness and such things, we live in such turbulent times, don’t we? I figure I’ll be commenting on some of the goings on and how they relate to family life. I am so grateful I didn’t have to grow up right now. The prospect of dating these days would be enough to have me considering a monastic existence.

So welcome aboard. Tomorrow the crazy train takes off for parts unknown. Never mind the clearly laid out track set before us.

~ Glenn