School is either starting this week or already has. If you have a 9th or 10th grader, I want you to hear this before the year really gets going. 9th grade college prep is not about panicking, spending money, or filling your kid’s schedule. It is about four simple moves that compound over the next four years. Let’s go through them.
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You are not behind. You are ahead of 90% of families.
The parents I meet who wish they’d done things differently are the ones who woke up the summer before senior year and realized the transcript was mostly locked in, the activities were random, and the story didn’t exist yet. They needed those four years back and couldn’t have them.
You have those four years. Every single one of them. And you don’t need to be anxious to use them well.
I’ll say this bluntly. The best-prepared families I work with, the ones whose students are getting into Dartmouth and Cornell and Vanderbilt, they didn’t grind harder than everyone else. They started earlier and smarter. Jack Beecher, one of our students who is now a sophomore at Dartmouth, put it best when I interviewed him: “9th grade, 10th grade is a great time to get ahead of the game without having stress and achieve great success.”
The families who wait until junior year can still land somewhere good. But they are playing catch-up. They are squeezing test prep into a semester when they should have had a year. They are building activities that started too late to look genuine. They are stressed. It doesn’t have to be that way.
What “ahead” actually looks like
Being ahead does not mean stacking your kid’s schedule with clubs to look impressive. It does not mean signing up for expensive summer programs. It does not mean loading up on every AP possible. Being ahead means laying the small pieces of groundwork this year that quietly compound over the next three.
I’ve been doing this for 16 years. I’ve worked with over 4,100 families. The ones whose students earn our program’s $116,502 average scholarship package didn’t look busy in 9th grade. They looked focused.
The four moves this month, in one line each
Here is what I would actually do this month if I had a 9th or 10th grader in the house.
- Take the Saturday Morning Test as a family this weekend.
- Pick two teachers this year to build a real relationship with.
- Get an SAT and ACT baseline this fall.
- Focus on one or two activities, not ten.
That’s it. Four things. None require a tutor. None cost money. All of them compound.
Move 1: Take the Saturday Morning Test this weekend
This is the first move because it is the seed for everything else. And it takes about fifteen minutes at the kitchen table.
The Saturday Morning Test is a single hypothetical question, credit to Cal Newport. Ask your student: if you had zero homework, zero obligations, and a completely free Saturday morning, what would you actually want to do?
Not the answer they think they should give. The real answer. Video games count. Fantasy football counts. Cooking counts. Building weird contraptions in the garage counts. The point is what they would actually reach for.
That answer is the seed of what will eventually become their story. Every showstopper activity I’ve seen a student build over 16 years started as an honest answer to that question.
How this snowballs into a real activity
One student’s Saturday Morning Test answer was fantasy football. Just that. So I told him to go one level deeper. Read about it. Analyze it. Build a spreadsheet. Two years later he had a serious data analytics project that ended up in his application. That is what I mean by the snowball effect. Start with what they actually care about, and it starts to compound.
Ana, a junior in our program from Texas with a 1540 SAT, took the Saturday Morning Test in 10th grade. Her honest answer led her to build Project Life Ready, an online course teaching teens about time management, physical fitness, emotional management, and personal financial foundations. She interviewed a corporate VP, a nutritionist, and a financial blogger for it. That project is now the centerpiece of her Stanford application.
96% of students who apply to Stanford have the grades and the scores. They still get rejected. What separates the ones who get in is the story. Ana has one because she started following her Saturday Morning Test answer in 10th grade, not 12th.
How to actually run this at home
Sit down for fifteen minutes. Ask the question. Do not judge the answer. Do not immediately try to turn it into “a college activity.” That kills it. Just ask a follow-up in a week: did you look into it more?
If you want a walk-through of exactly how to run this conversation and what to do with the answer, I made a free guide called
The Saturday Morning Test that walks you through it.
Move 2: Build real relationships with two teachers this year
Not brown-nose. Not office hours every day. Just show up, ask questions, do the work. And start now, in the first days of the school year, which is the best possible time.
In two years, when it’s time to ask for a letter of recommendation, those teachers will already know your kid. That letter goes to every school your student applies to. Every single one. And a real one is worth more than most families realize.
I tell my students to think about it from the teacher’s side. A teacher might have 40 students. Some have 400. They don’t remember most of them well enough to write something specific. The ones they remember are the ones who showed up. Not the ones with the highest grades. The ones who asked interesting questions, who came in when they were stuck, who cared.
Most families don’t realize this until junior year, when it’s time to ask for the letter and the teacher only remembers the student’s grade. That letter is polite. It is not memorable. And in a stack of 40,000 applications at a top school, polite is invisible.
Why two, not more
The best rec letters are specific. Two strong ones will always beat five polite ones. Colleges typically require exactly two teacher recommendations, sometimes with a third optional letter from outside school. Pick two teachers, ideally one in a subject your student likes and one in a subject where they’re growing. Show up. Do the work. That is the whole plan.
What to actually do this week
- Sit near the front of the classroom.
- Ask one substantive question in class each week.
- Do any extra reading that gets assigned.
- Say hi in the hallway. It matters more than parents think.
- If they get stuck on something, use office hours instead of Googling.
The guidance counselor angle
Same rule applies. Your guidance counselor writes a school-wide letter that also goes to every college your student applies to. If that counselor has 400 students, most of the letters are generic. Start the relationship in 9th or 10th grade, not senior year. Check in twice a year. Bring updates on what your kid is doing. In two or three years, that generic letter becomes a specific one.
Move 3: Get an SAT and ACT baseline this fall
Not because your kid is going to take the SAT anytime soon. Because you want a baseline. Then you know where the gaps are and you can build a plan that spreads across two years instead of two months.
Here’s the thing most families don’t realize. About 90 to 95 percent of the students I’ve coached over the last 16 years had a real affinity for one test over the other, the SAT or the ACT. It is not a coin flip. There is a right test for your kid, and finding it early saves months of wasted studying on the wrong one.
The move is simple. Take each test once, blind. That means no prep, no cramming. If your student is in 9th or 10th grade, they just sit for it. If they get a zero, it doesn’t matter. You have score choice. You never have to submit that score to anyone.
Once you have both baselines, you can eliminate the wrong test entirely and stop spreading energy across both. That is the low-hanging fruit.
If paying for both tests feels heavy
Do a full practice test at home for each. College Board and act.org both publish free practice tests. It is harder to simulate the testing environment in a bedroom or a kitchen, but the baseline is what matters. Time it. Do it once, then move on.
Timing
Fall of 10th grade is ideal. Fall of 9th is fine too. The earlier you know which test fits, the more runway you have. And the runway is what makes 9th grade college prep low-stress instead of high-stress.
Why blind matters
If you prep for one test before taking the other, you can’t tell whether a higher score came from the test being right for your kid or from the prep. Blind gives you the truth. Prep comes after you’ve chosen your test.
Move 4: Focus on one or two activities, not ten
As sign-ups happen over the next few weeks, this is where most families quietly go wrong. Depth beats breadth every single time. This is what I call Different > Difficult.
Colleges see thousands of students with ten activities each. They blend together. What stands out is the student who did one or two things at a genuinely high level. That is the showstopper.
Here’s the math I share with every parent. Ten units of energy poured into one activity beats one unit of energy scattered across ten activities. Every time. The kid with the fantasy football data project I mentioned earlier stood out. The kid who did seven clubs and captained none of them did not.
If your student is a freshman or sophomore, this is the exact window to start narrowing. Not to lock them into one thing forever. Just to stop the spread. Two activities they care about, done well, will always beat ten activities done thinly.
The activity-fair trap
Freshman activity-fair week is when most students accidentally sign up for six clubs because a friend told them to. Don’t let it happen. Pick two. Show up to those. Missing meetings for the other four is worse than never signing up in the first place.
How to think about dropping activities
Not everything a freshman tried needs to continue into sophomore year. Pruning is part of the plan. If your kid tried Model UN in 9th grade and hated it, dropping it in 10th is a feature, not a failure. Colleges want to see progression and commitment, not a laundry list.
Where this connects to Move 1
This is why the Saturday Morning Test matters so much. If your kid has told you what they actually care about, you already know which one or two activities are worth going deep on. The rest can go.
Frequently asked questions about 9th grade college prep
Is 9th grade too early to start thinking about college?
No. It is the ideal time. The families who start early aren’t stressed early. They are the ones who get to senior year with room to breathe.
Does my 9th grader need a tutor or a college consultant right now?
No. None of the four moves in this post require paying anyone. They just require starting. Support becomes more useful in junior year when the plan gets more complex.
What if my kid doesn’t have a “passion” yet?
Most 9th and 10th graders don’t. The Saturday Morning Test is not about finding a lifelong passion. It is about finding what they would actually spend time on when nobody is watching. That is the starting point, and it changes over the four years.
Should a freshman take AP classes?
Only if they can get at least a B+ in them. That is the B+ Rule. Rigor matters, but not at the cost of the GPA. If a class is going to pull your student down to a B-minus, drop a level.
When should we start visiting colleges?
Not yet. Save real campus visits for junior year, when your student has enough information to actually evaluate fit. Freshman and sophomore visits usually don’t produce useful signal.
How many activities should a freshman actually do?
One or two, done well. The goal is depth, not breadth. Colleges are not counting the number of clubs on your student’s list. They are looking for genuine investment in something.
The four years that make everything else easier
You have four years. Not four months. Not two summers. Four full years to build a story. And none of the four moves in this post require stress, money, or a tutor.
The families who wait until senior year to think about all this are the ones running out of runway. The families who start now don’t have to run at all. They walk.
If you want a real plan for your 9th or 10th grader’s next four years, that is what we build for every family who works with us. Apply for the Ivy-Bound Challenge and we’ll talk through your student’s situation and map out the next steps together.
Ready to take the next step?
If you want a personalized roadmap for your 9th or 10th grader, apply for the Ivy-Bound Challenge. We’ll walk through your student’s situation and map out a plan for the next four years, tailored to their strengths, their target schools, and your timeline. No pressure, no pitch.
And if you’re not ready for a call yet, start with my free Freshman and Sophomore Head Start. It covers the 6 highest-leverage things 9th and 10th graders should be doing right now, and it takes about 15 minutes to work through. It is the exact same starter framework I walk every new family in our program through on day one.
