Regardless of anything else, you’ve got to have the grades, test scores, and extra-curricular/leadership records from highschool to be realistically in consideration by the particular school’s admissions office. If you don’t and it’s early enough in your highschool career, consider another highschool where you can stand out. It frankly does little good to go to a very demanding highschool, struggle, have poor grades and no extra-curricular life to show at the end. It is the rare situation in which a college will care enough or know enough about where one went to highschool to value the distinction between a 2.7 from super-hard prep and a 4.0 from regular decent public HS. With similar test scores, they’ll take the 4.0 public school kid every time. The other alternative is to look at other colleges and recognize that a 2.7, even with pretty stellar SATs isn’t going to get you into Johns Hopkins or Stanford. Not that it’s impossible–you might be that good a dancer and have other valuable, marketable attributes–but it’s extremely unlikely, so don’t get your hopes up, when your stats don’t merit it, even if it seems like the dance with the admissions officer is going beautifully.

I suppose two words of clarification are due. First, I would never advocate that students make nuisances of themselves. I know some over-zealous kids can be so in-you-face that they end up turning off their potential dance partners. I find a lot of my clients are the opposite, however: they need encouragement to connect with college admissions officers. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of visiting a high school–and not one kid shows up.

Second, public and private institutions are different in their attitudes toward the dance. Certainly in Colorado, it is nearly impossible to find a person to contact in the admissions offices at University of Colorado and Colorado State University.

But just down the road at Colorado College, admissions officers there have made it clear to me and my in-school colleagues that a Colorado high school student has next to no chance of admission unless they make a visit and (preferably) schedule an interview. And most of admissions officers at private colleges value the visit and the contacts very, very much in deciding whom to admit and whom to reject.

I could also say that the most selective colleges in the land are less likely to want to dance with you very much: they have so many suitors, that one more really titillate them all that much.

So, students: know your dance partner! As Anne suggests, you can do no harm to ask whether your partner wants to be wooed. Usually they do.

I’m an admissions counselor, and we do not grant points toward admissions when a student makes contact with us. And in fact, this advice has become a problem for us as more students seek to make one-on-one appointments with us, not realizing that it doesn’t gain them anything but a conversation. Everything we have to say to most students is contained within our regular visit session.

With us and most other colleges facing the same problem, just ask. We can tell you right away that contact with us doesn’t get you “points.” Though you can probably figure it out for yourself, to some extent: we’re a large public institution, and I would suspect many others in our category are in the same boat.