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Congratulations! Good work on snagging a place.
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It provides you the easiest and best access to resources, community, mentors and other advantages that increase your change of landing a spot at your dream US institution. If you don’t have a dream institution, and simply want to be anywhere in the US, the benefits of ST-US will help here too.
ST is the most insane & incredible selection process (it mimics what US colleges do). Only the best and brightest and those with the most potential are admitted. You are one of them, so is each of the other 149. They all have unique life stories and ambitions and goals and life backgrounds and living situations and academic/non-aca interests etc etc. Lots you can learn from everyone and be inspired by.
Preparing for applying and getting into the US is a very high time investment. You first have to decide whether this is going to be worth your time. Decide by good reasoning as early as you can.
Create a week-by-week plan for your actions and deadlines until the college application deadline. I am totally aware that it seems insane to plan this far (1.7 yrs) in advance. It is. Applying to and getting into Dartmouth College is an insane thing to achieve. Therefore, you are required to be this extremely effective/insane of a person for something insane to work out. ST are not admitting you this early into your Sixth Form experience because they need you to be there. They would like for you to achieve your goals, and they understand that achieving this insane goal of getting into these extreme prestigious colleges as a British person requires this much planning and preparation. They have been doing this for at least 14 years, they’re very good at it, at least at this point!
Furthermore, Americans that get into Yale at the age of 17 or 18 have been being prepared to get into Yale from the age of 4. People that have understood these systems for much longer than you (typically Americans or parents that went to top colleges) understand how important these types of colleges are to life, so they are doing things that seem insane (starting at aged 7) in order for the transformational opportunity (Yale) to be snagged.
When you get to university or college (we hope), you will see exactly the same thing, with something like breaking into the banking industry. There will be people at university that have had mums that have been working in top positions banks for the past 20 years, so will have prepared their kid to get the Goldman Sachs internship in college.. whilst other people will be the roommate of that person and not know what a Goldman Sachs even is. I have just described my own life. Now this person is starting the 100-meter race 300m back will have to run a few times harder to get the same goal. This is why the period with which you interact with a Sutton Trust, until you hit ’Apply’, will be very intense. ST will be monitoring your progress and will give you feedback on how ready they think you are to apply to where you want to apply to.
Furthermore, they will let you know what schools they think you should apply to based on your profile.
Applying to America IS another A-Level - it requires the same time commitment to have success in it. Are you going to be successful with everything due to the added time commitment of this program/applying to the U.S? It is very common for other very important things to slip like grades, commitment to clubs, mental well-being, social life, fun/video games/doom-scrolling. Since you don’t magically have more time in life, decide what things you will forego. People that are successful with the American process are those that are able to handle everything that is crucial to getting them to where they need to be. This will take very good judgement and organisational skill that people possess to different levels. I took a gap year to make my application the best that it could be, but not everyone has this privilege.