To increase my GPA, I employed a few strategies throughout my high school career to put me ahead of my peers. Attending school in a more disadvantaged community, one of my goals was to maintain a high GPA so I could stand out to the admission officials for many of my reach universities. Using my strategies, I was admitted to UCLA, UC Berkeley, Cal Poly Pomona, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and LMU, among other well-respected universities. Some of my strategies worked while others didn’t, but the most important key to successfully boosting your GPA is to be disciplined and persistent in whatever strategies you stick to.
The most significant way I was able to boost my GPA was by improving my time management so that I could take honors, APs, and summer classes. While most students are content with completing their fall and spring semesters with regular classes and spending the summer away from academics, it may be best for their GPA if they invest their academic year taking harder classes and summer time to stand out in the future. For me, taking harder classes not only challenged and improved my education, and by spending my last two summers in online classes, I was able to boost my weighted GPA above my peers by a few tenths, making a huge difference in the end.
Another significant reason I had the discipline to boost my GPA was by prioritizing my mental health. I would like to point out that when striving to achieve a GPA boost, I highly discourage you from taking every honor or AP offered unless you have the resources and support to help you pass each class. This is because taking many difficult classes at a time can cause stress and could lead you to fall behind in all your classes, subsequently causing your GPA to decline more significantly compared to if you didn’t take that extra AP or honors class. For me, creating a schedule helped tremendously when managing my mental health. It is essential to prioritize your mental health to be successful in school since a lackluster mind creates lackluster work.
In the end, strategies that didn’t work when boosting my GPA were taking college classes since they did not impact my high school GPA, procrastinating, doing all of my work in one sitting, doing homework outside of my efficient hours, and not managing my time and stress. It’s important to research and test out if some of these strategies do work for you, but in general, people tend to be most effective when they manage their time and prioritize their mental health. Never tie your grades or GPA to your mental health. Never plagiarize, and never cheat. I have made mistakes in the past like forgetting to submit an assignment or not studying as much as I should have, yet the best strategy to have when improving your GPA, and in life in general, is to get back up from your failures and do try a new way to improve yourself.