Interview by Alison Herget, Higher Education Program Manager at Minerva Project.

Many students feel overwhelmed when they think about life after high school. They know they want to go to college, but don’t truly understand what it takes to get there. They hope one day for a meaningful career, but don’t know where to start in preparing themselves for one. Educators can help lay the foundation for student success in college and beyond by considering these tips.

Help them understand that getting into college is not just about GPA and test scores

As most admission officers at selective colleges will tell you, they would exponentially over-enroll their class each year if they selected students only based on grades and their performance on standardized tests. Students need to look at the whole picture.

Burdick says that the numbers do not tell the whole story in an application. “Every GPA a student attains reflects the context in which they’ve developed; it’s an abstraction of three or four years’ worth of experiences. Tell me a student’s GPA and you’ve told me very little about them. Test scores have a kind of objectivity in what they’re measuring, but that measurement is only a…