Originally sent as an AltView newsletter on May 4, 2026.
First, all the best to students writing IB board exams in the coming weeks. This stretch can feel long, so I hope the final run is steady.
Over the past week, a version of the same question has come up in a few parent conversations:
The child is in Class 9, or moving toward Class 10. The family is thinking about admissions abroad, but the question is not yet about college lists or essays.
It is simpler, and harder to answer well: what should we actually do with the next few months?
I understand why parents ask early. By Class 11, choices start to harden. Subjects are chosen. Time gets tighter. If the student has never had room to try things properly, families often end up borrowing ideas from wherever they can find them.
That is when the activity list starts growing for the wrong reasons.
For a younger student, May and June should not become a shopping season for certificates, internships, and programs that sound useful in a WhatsApp group. I would rather use this time to watch what the child returns to when there is a little space.
Maybe that becomes a small coding project. Maybe it is a reading trail, a local data project, a writing habit, a science experiment, a design attempt, or something else entirely. Many of these attempts will go nowhere. That is fine. The value is not always in the final output. Sometimes the value is in learning what the student is willing to stay with after the first burst of enthusiasm fades.
We wrote about this recently in a piece on micro-projects and manufactured opportunities:
Why small student projects often work better than manufactured internships
The article is especially relevant for Class 9 and 10 families who are trying to avoid two opposite mistakes: doing nothing because it feels too early, or doing too much because everybody else seems to be adding things.
For students entering Class 12, May and June have a different job.
By then, it is usually too late to pretend that one more activity will transform the application. The better work is less glamorous: narrowing the college list, checking affordability, deciding whether Early Decision is genuinely sensible, thinking about recommendation letters, and beginning essay work before school pressure returns.
For a rising senior, I would be asking: what is this application already saying, what is still unclear, and where are we likely to run into trouble if we wait until August?
So the advice changes with the stage. A Class 9 or 10 student needs space without being over-managed. A Class 12 student needs structure before the application season gets noisy.
If your family is in either of those stages, we are happy to help you think it through.
I have also started a small WhatsApp space where I share occasional notes like this on admissions, profile-building, essays, and related decisions. Low volume, mostly one-way.
AltView Admissions Notes on WhatsApp
If this feels useful, feel free to forward it to another parent who may be thinking through summer planning, profile-building, or applications. And if someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe here for future updates.