Are you interested in joining your high school newspaper? Many high schools have a school paper to give students an opportunity to hone their writing skills and keep students, staff, and teachers updated on school and community news.

Participating in your high school newspaper is a great way to improve your writing skills, learn more about journalism, and develop pieces you can include in your portfolio or resume. Read on to learn all you'll need to know about how to join your school newspaper, what work you’ll be doing, and how it will benefit you.

If you’ve found this article, I assume you’re a student or parent considering your options for your or your child’s high school education. When comparing high schools, average SAT score can be an extremely useful metric since it can give you a sense of the quality of the education and the caliber of students at that high school.

There are several methods for locating a school’s average SAT score, each of which I'll outline in this post. I'll also explain in more depth why you should care about average SAT score and what it can tell you about how high schools compare.

If you just took the ACT or if you took the ACT in 2008-2010, you might be curious as to how your percentile score compares to students with the same scaled score in other years? In this guide, I'll explain what percentiles are, how they work on the ACT, and why they matter (even the older ones). I'll also give you ACT percentile charts for 2011-2014, so you can see how your scores stack up against historical ones.

Volunteering is a great way to fulfill community service requirements for school, strengthen your resume, and give back to your community.

However, some students have difficulties finding a volunteer opportunity that they are excited about.

Need some inspiration to do good deeds? Read on for a list of over 400 community service ideas for teens.

If you’ve found this guide, you're probably looking for a good high school, or you want to see how your high school measures up compared to others. When comparing high schools, a helpful metric is average ACT Score.

In this guide, I’ll tell you what average ACT score represents, why you should care about a school’s average ACT score, and where you can find information on average ACT scores by high school.

You’ve been working hard in high school to get good grades and test scores, but there’s another part of the college application that many students find more confusing: the extracurricular activity section.

How many extracurricular activities do you need for college applications? How many are too many? Will you get rejected from a school if you don’t have the right amount?

Many students who have participated in activities throughout high school are shocked to look at the Common App and realize there are ten spaces to fill out. Does that mean you have to be involved in ten different activities?

In this article I will tell you:

• The important things colleges need to see in your extracurriculars
• The ideal amount of extracurricular activities
• The minimum amount of extracurriculars you can have
• What to do if you have no extracurriculars
• What to do if you have too many extracurriculars

Last time we review how you would go about writing great recommendation for a student strong in literature or engineering (click here to see that post!) This time, we continue the series and go over a strong social science recommendation as well as a general hard-worker, conscientious-student recommendation.

Understanding how to do your best on the ACT math section means understanding how the math section is structured and where you can get the most points for your time and energy.

We’ll walk you through how each ACT math section is organized and how you can use this information to your benefit, both in your studies and as you take your official ACTs.

Though the majority of ACT math problems use diagrams or simply ask you to solve given mathematical equations, you will also see approximately 15-18 word problems on any given ACT (between 25% and 30% of the total math section). This means that knowing how best to deal with word problems will help you significantly when taking the test. Though there are many different types of ACT word problems, most of them are not nearly as difficult or cumbersome as they may appear.

This post will be your complete guide to ACT word problems: how to translate your word problems into equations and diagrams, the different types of word problems you’ll see on the test, and how best to go about solving your word problems for test day.

You will usually see one conic section question (though no more than one) on any given ACT, but just what is a conic section and how do you solve it? Luckily for us, though conic section questions are rare, they are generally straightforward and can get you an easy point if you take a few minutes to study them.

This will be your complete guide to conic sections—what they are, how you'll see them on the test, and the best way to approach these types of ACT math questions.

You may be wondering how your SAT score is determined. Where does that score of 200-800 on each section of the SAT come from? What does your SAT score mean? Or, maybe you're familiar with the concept of raw scores, but you don't know how your raw score is converted into a scaled score. Hopefully, this article will answer your questions and clear up any confusion.

In this post, I'll clarify the difference between raw scores and scaled scores and provide charts that show the SAT raw score conversion to scaled score. Furthermore, I'll explain why the data from these SAT score charts can be helpful to you in your SAT preparation.

So you want to be proactive and save for college. Maybe you’re a high school student who wants to build up a college fund for yourself, or maybe you’re a parent or family member who wants to save for a young loved one. No matter your situation, you’re taking a proactive step in making college a little bit more affordable.

In this post, I’ll discuss the things you need to know in order to build, keep, and grow college savings. We'll discuss the five best ways to save for college to lower student debt on graduation and take a load off your mind.

First, though, I'll talk about the question you should be considering before you implement your savings plan: how much should you be putting away in the first place? Read on to find out!

As college costs continue to rise, financial aid has become a necessity for most college students. Ideally, the listed cost of attendance won’t deter you from applying to or attending the college of your dreams. Knowing about the process will enable you to maximize the amount of financial aid for college you receive and prevent finances from becoming an impediment to reaching your college goals.

In this article, I will define and explain the different types of financial aid that are available for college. Furthermore, I will explain how colleges determine your eligibility for financial aid, and I’ll offer you guidance and resources to make sure you know all the different types of aid available to you.

When should you ask for a recommendation letter? Many high schools answer this question for you with an official timeline and procedure for your rec letter requests. In addition to school policy, your teachers might also set rules around how and when to ask for letters of rec.

This guide will go over the most common recommendation letter guidelines, as well as some not so common ones that you hopefully won’t encounter (like a lottery system!). To start, let’s consider which guidelines are set on a school-wide basis and which ones fall into the realm of individual teachers.

The college application process can be a long and difficult journey for high school students. Organizing your application materials well in advance and paying attention to deadlines is critical. You should also start researching colleges earlier rather than later so that you can account for each school's specific application requirements.

In this infographic, I've broken down the actions you need to take to be prepared for college applications starting at the beginning of your junior year through to your senior spring.