Your Transcript Is Your Ticket – Making It Easy

You want to get accepted into the colleges you’ve applied to. Maybe you really need to earn scholarship money to make college affordable. For admissions, you’ll need to tell a compelling story about yourself that demonstrates why you are the preferred candidate. For scholarships, you’ll want to quantify the contributions you’ll make to the school in order for them to essentially make a bet on you. You simplify the scholarship decision making process by providing a stronger and clearer case than the other great students vying for funding.

The starting point for the college’s decision making process is your transcript. When building a transcript, think about your audience and the job they will do. Your audience is the college admissions office and the counselors working hard to build an academically strong, socially diversified, and experientially well-rounded student body. With a 10-second skimming of your transcript, you have an opportunity to have the admissions counselor check these mental boxes and engage further with your application.

We’ll dive deeper into the strategy behind the content of the transcript in other posts. For now, let’s walk through some basics and how you will help the college build a stronger student body by making clear for them what you bring to the table.

1. Include high school courses you’ve taken at any age
   You can demonstrate an early academic interest by including math courses at an Algebra I level or higher if you happened to take these in, say, 6th, 7th, or 8th grade.
2. Include college-level work at any age
   You can demonstrate deep and sustained interest in an academic discipline by showing how you continued this work past the normal high school end points. For instance, if you do not have access to standard AP courses, you could include Biology as part of a duel-credit program. And with a Biology prerequisite out of the way, you could continue your deep dive with a Genetics and Cell Biology course.
3. Include demonstrated ability and skills
   Continuing the Biology example, perhaps you’ve engaged in hospital lab work or pathology work for a veterinarian and have become proficient with the laboratory environment and tools, you can include a self-study item on your transcript for credit.

Part of a successful strategy to being accepted at your target schools and earning scholarship money is articulating your strengths more clearly than the students you are competing against. An effective transcript is the starting point to help the college admissions counselor make her decisions because you will have provided a snapshot of your unique academic gifts, talents, abilities, and interests in a format that is easily understood.

The CollegeTicket transcript is designed to provide the flexibility and depth you need to engage the admissions counselor’s interest. Here’s an in-depth look at the CollegeTicket transcript.

If you have questions we could respond to in future posts, please drop us an email at info@college-ticket.com. We look forward to hearing about your college admissions success!