In 2020, a total of 11.9 lakh students appeared for CBSE Class 12 examination. A 14% increase in the last 5 years! This means that the competition is increasing and is going to keep increasing year on year. 
While marks keep soaring, the acceptance rates of top colleges still remain the same. To choose the right candidates from lakhs of candidates, top colleges are introducing novel admission processes and criteria.
In this scenario, you must be wondering, ‘What can my child do to succeed?’ Well, the answer is they should be as prepared as they can be. Naturally, the next question that would come to your mind would be, ‘Prepared in what?’
After a decade of helping students build successful futures, we have come up with a list of milestones that they must complete before entering Grade 11. Completing these 4 milestones will increase your child’s chance of success significantly.
Read on to understand what the four milestones are.
1. Discover Who Your Child Is & What Their Interests Are
Before you and your child take any major career decisions, it is essential that you discover who your child is. 
These are some of the questions you should have answers for. If not, your child will just end up following the crowd due to peer pressure.
Understanding where your child’s interests lie helps you in two ways. One is to help them pursue their interest as a career. The doubt of what to do after the 10th will be answered when your child discovers who he/she is. The second is that you can make them aware of the roadblocks they are going to face on the way.
Sometimes, children might not be open to talk about their interests to their parents. In such a situation, a career counsellor comes to your rescue.
A career counsellor is qualified and equipped to guide your child, expose them to various career options, give them the right advice, and help them discover who they are.
Read our blog on The Importance of Career Guidance at the Right Age to understand the difference a career counsellor can make in your child’s life.
If you want to take the assistance of science to understand your child’s interests, then Psychometric Assessments are the solution for you. Psychometric Assessments are scientific tests that measure a person’s aptitude, cognitive abilities, and personality.
These tests will help you discover who your child is with absolute accuracy. Your child’s doubt of ‘what to do after 10th’ will be answered correctly by psychometric assessments. When you are choosing a psychometric test for your child, make sure you check the credibility of it. We at Univariety, have conducted 50,000+ psychometric tests in the last ten years.
Discovering who your child is, is the foundation for his/her future. Make sure your child completes this milestone by the end of Grade 8 or 9 to stay ahead of his/her competition and to be on the right course.
You do not want your child who could be a gifted biologist or a lawyer to follow the herd and pursue a popular career they wouldn’t enjoy!
2. Career Goal Setting
Once you discover who your child is, the next step is to finalise their career goals. By career goals, we mean deciding on the career path, college, and country to study in.
Why is setting a goal so important?
While one reason for goal setting is to make sure your child is successful, another main reason to align efforts to the end results.
In today’s time, every career has a different requirement, every college has different criteria and every country has a slightly different admission process. For your child to make it to their dream university and pursue their passion, it is important for them to make a choice and finalise goals. Here’s a snapshot of what top colleges look for in a student:
One should first crystallise goals of which career they want to pursue and in which college & country (3Cs). Imagine your child putting their sweat, blood and tears into an activity, only to realise that the 3Cs they chose, later on, do not value all the activity at all.
So ideally, your child should set career goals as early as possible, so that they can start working in the right direction. Setting career goals for your child can be a herculean task, as one has to consider so many different variables and find the right balance between your child’s career satisfaction and career success.
It is advisable to get expert help in this matter so that you and your child can make the right choice and set solid goals. Your child’s concern of ‘what to do after 10th’ will be solved when he/she gets expert help and sets concrete career goals.
3. Complete An Internship (Offline or Online)
Internships are an essential part of learning for a student. Recognising that, even the new National Education Policy (NEP) has included it. The NEP 2020 proposed that students at all higher educational institutes will be provided with opportunities for internships with local industry, businesses, and arts.
The policy also includes research internships at the educational institutions to further improve their employability. This should give you a fair idea of how important internships are for a student to demonstrate interest in the subject of their passion and to gain knowledge above and beyond the curriculum.
Many top colleges like Harvard, Princeton, MIT, among others look for demonstrated interest in a student and the best way to demonstrate is by doing an internship.
Here are five reasons why your child should do an internship:
- To get real-life experience & exposure
- To understand if their dream career is what they imagined
- To demonstrate interest and show proof of passion
- To enhance the curriculum vitae (CV)
- And lastly to build a network
The more competitive the industry or employer is, the more important it becomes to have experience as an intern. Not only are they important for students who know what their goal is, but they are important for students to confirm what they think their goal may be before making further commitments. – Benjamin Caldarelli, Partner – Princeton College Consulting, LLC
The current crisis that we are faced with has forced us all to stay at home. In this situation, offline internships are a far-fetched idea. This does not mean that your child can’t take up an internship. Internships are still possible online. In today’s time, online internships hold as much value as offline internships, sometimes even more.
Find a credible online internship and give your child a chance to learn, validate his/her career choice, and become successful. Our Virtual Internship Program can be the perfect opportunity for your child to learn about a certain career of their choosing right from home itself.
With career-based internships, practical assignments, simulated work environments, expert videos, and a valuable internship certificate, your child can explore and experience his/her dream career. Read our blog to understand about the Virtual Internship program in detail
Explore The Virtual Internship Program
4. Start Building A Strong Non-Academic Profile
With inflation in marks that seems almost unreal, colleges in India and around the world are forced to apply novel selection methods. Marks can no longer be a selector, but only an eliminator in the application process. What we mean by this is that marks will only be used as an eliminator in the first round, but beyond that, they might play a huge role.
In this situation, what will help your child secure admission is a balance between academics and a strong non-academic profile. Admission officers look at a student’s profile starting from Class 9, just to make sure that the child is truly passionate about something. Any fluff just to get through the admissions process will be caught easily.
A good profile reflect:
- Deep interest
- Commitment
- Consistency
- Excellence
So, the sooner your child starts building a profile, the better it is for them. After discovering who they are, getting goals, and validating them with internships, they can start building a profile aligned to the end goal.
A non-academic profile becomes all the more important with so many global colleges cancelling their entrance examinations or making them optional. Now more than ever, colleges want to know who you are.
Like we mentioned earlier, every college looks for something different and it is important to understand that and build a profile accordingly. To choose activities and build a tailor-made profile, you will need professional help and that’s where ProMap comes in.
ProMap – short for Profile Mapping, where we will build a personalised roadmap keeping in mind your end goal and increase your chance of admission success.
Your marks are JUST the elimination filter in admission processes now. But, by building a strong non-academic profile with ProMap you are strengthening your personality, which is the SELECTION filter for colleges and will give you a disproportionate advantage.
ProMap is created by eminent counsellors from all around the country and Univariety together. It helps your child crystallise his/her goal at an early age. Then, we sift more than 500 curated programs from around the world to create a personalised roadmap filled with super-curricular activities.
Conclusion – A Journey To Success
Ensuring that your child completes all the four milestones before grade 11 will give them a huge advantage over his/her peers. They also end up becoming more confident, evolved, and determined adults who understand exactly what they are doing.
Now that you have read everything about the milestones that will make a difference for your child. What are you going to do next? Comment and let us know!
Sneha Mashetty
Sneha Mashetty is a former journalist who covered state politics. With a degree in Journalism & Masters in Electronic Media, she combines her research techniques, versatility in writing for the web, and love for education at Univariety. She has written extensively for International schools, Ed-Tech products, emerging learning technologies for half a decade. An avid reader, a travel lover & a movie buff who loves to have meaningful conversations
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Sneha Mashettyhttps://www.univariety.com/blog/author/sneha-mashetty/
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Sneha Mashettyhttps://www.univariety.com/blog/author/sneha-mashetty/
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Sneha Mashettyhttps://www.univariety.com/blog/author/sneha-mashetty/
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Sneha Mashettyhttps://www.univariety.com/blog/author/sneha-mashetty/
