Meet Mia

Meet Mia

We are excited to introduce Mia, one of our 2020 scholars. Mia’s diligence and self discipline allowed her to score in the 94th percentile overall.

Mia is from Hong Kong and speaks four languages—English, Japanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese. Mia has a deep appreciation for travel, different cultures, and meeting new people.

Mia likes to dance, play piano, and participate in community service projects. Mia has been dancing since she was five years old. She does ballet, contemporary, jazz, and a little bit of hip hop. She recently started doing choreography, which is something she really enjoys. Mia also plays the piano, which she does primarily for fun but also plays in the occasional concert or competition. For community service work, Mia is involved in various clubs inside and outside of school. The projects primarily focus on environmental efforts, but she has also done some work for human rights.

At school, Mia enjoys participating in speech with her friends. During her second year, she won third place at a competition. The following year, she was a co-captain for the speech club and participated in Model United Nations, which involves representing a country during the speech competition.

Preparation

When Mia first took the SSAT, she didn’t do as well as she’d hoped on the Verbal section. After the first test, she studied vocabulary words using flashcards whenever she had the chance, such as in the car and during the bus ride to school. Mia also read a lot of books to improve her reading comprehension.

During preparation, Mia took several Test Innovators practice tests. After taking a practice test, Mia would analyze her results to identify the areas she needed to work on. She explained, “After [taking a practice test], I would analyze what I got wrong and identify why I got it wrong and what I needed to do to improve.” Mia emphasized the benefits of taking full-length practice tests. She explained that after taking several practice tests, her second test day didn’t feel quite so challenging because she had developed testing stamina.

Advice for Students

Mia’s advice for other students preparing for the test is to incorporate preparation into your daily schedule. Rather than having a few long practice sessions, Mia recommends doing several shorter sessions with breaks in between. Her advice is “definitely not to cram, and try incorporating [prep] into your everyday life.” Mia explained that some of her friends didn’t do much to prepare because they thought a multiple choice test would be easy. After taking the test, they realized that it was actually quite difficult and that preparation would have been very beneficial.

Mia also recommends reading more, especially higher-level books. Mia explained, “I read books like Frankenstein, which was really hard for me. But a lot of the vocab I learned in that book was on the test, so that really helped me.”

New School

Mia is attending 9th grade at Phillips Academy Andover, a boarding and day school for high school students. Because Mia is from Hong Kong, she is living on campus. Mia’s mother went to boarding school, so Mia knew what to expect and had been looking forward to the experience for quite some time. Mia is especially excited about participating in the school’s dance program.