In each of the SPS questions, you will have an opportunity to highlight your strengths, personality, aspirations, and motivations for attending TJ. This will be one of the only opportunities to highlight your achievements in the past three years, so if you have had any achievements but don’t convey them on your SIS, then the admissions office may not learn about it. Therefore, using most of your allotted space to write quality responses is a good idea.
This guide will prepare you for the three short questions and ensure that you will flesh out the best possible response.
The first thing you should understand when approaching the Student Portrait Sheet is that you want to convey “fit” between you and the school. “Fit” is often an overused and vague term, so I’ll try to convey precisely what this means and how you can use it in your application to TJHSST.
When admission officers are choosing applicants, they are looking for certain attributes of potential students who will really take advantage of a lot of the opportunities available at the school. TJ has a pretty high drop out rate, and a lot of students at the end of the four-year experience may not have utilized as many of the school’s resources as they could have. TJHSST uses a lot of public funding dollars to provide incredible resources in their laboratories, classes, clubs, and student leadership opportunities. They want to make sure that their admitted students will take advantage of those resources, study hard in the classes, and be happy with their decision to attend TJ.
Therefore, your primary responsibility, above all other factors, is to show that you’re going to take advantage of the resources available at the school, and you’re going to be really happy and hardworking in all your classes. Let’s say you’re an admissions officer, and you had to choose between two students:
Student A: the smartest student in the world, Einstein level intellect, but would be incredible uncomfortable at the institution, and have trouble interacting with the teachers and peers at the school
Student B: an above average student, incredibly hard working, loves to take new opportunities, and would be incredibly diligent in learning and taking advantage of opportunities at the school, would be incredibly happy with their decision to attend TJ at the end of four years
I’ve asked this question in all of my writing classes over the past 6 years, and every single student has always said that they would choose student B. This is because admissions officers want to choose somebody who has good “fit” with their school – who knows what they’re getting into, and who will be really happy taking advantage of the curricular and extracurricular resources that the school offers.
So now the question is, how do you show “fit” in your Student Portrait Sheet? There are three ways:
First, you show how your past experiences make you extremely interested in learning more using TJ’s courses and labs and extracurricular opportunities. You have to be extremely specific here, so that you can show that what you’ve done in the past has both prepared you and also made you extremely intrigued in the possible study opportunities in the future.
For instance, let’s say you were involved in Mathcounts, and your middle school made it to the state level of competition. You did it for 6th and 7th grade and you placed in the top 4 students of your middle school. In this case, you should explain two things of your experience – 1) what skillsets you’ve learned through your experiences, and 2) why this makes you excited to attend TJ. Each of your experiences that you write about should have these two components, and as long as you have a sentence that answers at least both of them, then you’ll be doing an amazing job in showing fit to the school.
Here’s an example:
I participated in Mathcounts in 7th grade and 8th grade. In the 7th grade, I placed in the top 4 students and represented my school at the state-level competition. The preparation was intense – coming home after school and solving dozens of competitive problems from my handbook for several hours every night – but I gained a joy for finding solutions for complex problems in daily life. I really loved the idea that mathematics is a universal language that can be used to solve vast problems, from estimating the number of beans in a jar to plotting a potential trajectory for a satellite. It’s also taught me that there are so many approaches to solve a single problem, and many times, it’s more interesting to solve the same problem using a different equation than solving a new problem the same way. My experiences have only solidified my desire to attend TJHSST, in which students are offered a vast array of interconnected subjects to discover solutions to today’s pressing problems.
Do you see how this example did three things with the experience of Mathcounts – 1) it showed what the student learned from the experience (figuring out that there are many ways to solve a question), 2) that they love competitive mathematics, and 3) that this makes them really excited about taking advantage of the resources at TJ? By showing the “impact” of the activity – both on their skillsets and on their desire to attend TJ - the student is able to really demonstrate their fit at the school.
Here’s a drill you should do with all your activities – list out every single activity you did during middle school – it can be big or small, it can be a competition (like Mathcounts) or just an interest (like building legos) and think of what you learned, what skills you gained, and how these experiences make you more and more excited about attending TJ.
Second, you write about what you’re interested in, and show how that connects well with the sorts of things you will be learning as a TJ student.
Some students say they’re interested in programming, or in math, or in science, or in engineering, but that’s as far as they go in their written statement. In the Student Portrait Sheet, you have the chance to really dive deep into what interests you and why. For instance, if you’re interested in programming, there should be something about programming that’s really interesting to you. You could be interested in the ways that programming involves creativity to solve a problem using the least amount of processing, or the ways that you can continuously expand on the knowledge you know to become a better and better programmer. It might be that when you were coding a board game, you were able to create a new feature, and you learned that coding involves a lot of interesting thinking to create features that have never existed before.
You should really meditate on what it is you’re interested in and what about that subject makes you interested in it. That really distinguishes you from everybody in the crowd who writes that “they’re passionate about math”. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it’s a lot more compelling when you explain why you’re passionate about math.
Now that you’ve established why you’re interested in the field, you can expand on this by doing some research beforehand. You can do some reading in ScienceDirect or in a science journal about some current developments that are happening in the news, or you can look up some YouTube videos about some people who are in the field of your interest and what a day in their life looks like. Now, you’ll be able to explain what sorts of problems are particularly interesting to you in that field, and you can show that you’re really well-informed about the field that you’re passionate about.
Here’s an example:
I’ve been really fascinated with robotics since the 5th grade. There’s something really interesting to me about the ways that machines are able to automate complex tasks done by humans to expand more time for creative work. I also really love working with my hands, so when I took apart my old laptop or my watch, I had the time of my life understanding the inner workings of these simple machines. In my 6th grade science class, I became really interested in the physics of simple machines, and how mechanics can combine simple machines like pulleys and levers to decrease the amount of input required by several orders of magnitude. Upon recommendation from my science teacher, I read “Simple Machines – The Way they Work” and became really fascinated with the subject as a whole. At TJHSST, I’m really excited to be on the track to do a research project in the Robotics Lab my senior year, and take courses such as Design and Technology and Artificial Intelligence.
This example does a really great job of showing interest, because there’s a lot of specific details in it. It shows how the writer is really interested in robotics and mechanics, but goes beyond the first sentence by providing a lot of evidence for this (reading a comprehensive book, showing a lot of interest, breaking apart machines to see how they work, and knowing the school’s offering to learn more).
Third, you write about your detailed plans if you were accepted into TJ.
For this example, you should have a good understanding of some of the details of TJHSST.
Read the course catalogue at TJ, and write down a few of the courses that you might be interested in taking. Having an understanding of course offerings really shows that you know a lot about the school. The course catalogue can be found here. https://tjhsst.fcps.edu/academics
See some of the senior labs that are offered at TJ for 12th grade students. If you look at the classes that are required to be in that senior research lab, you can gain a better understanding of the track that you might want to take as a TJ student. You can find this information here https://tjhsst.fcps.edu/node/2761
Finally, try reaching out to a student or alumni of TJ, and ask them if they have any specific details of their experience at TJ that might be of interest to you. This will help you understand more about the school and what specific aspects go well with your own interests.
This was my detailed post on how to write the TJ Student Portrait Sheet. I hope it was of high value, and I really appreciate your time reading through this post.
Best Regards,
Naman
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