It depends on where you want to go Eos. Im going to tell you some hard truths:
The 'best' colleges expect essays as a preliminary. You won't look good because took APs, you'll get looked at because you took APs. They aren't hard, nothing in school is hard, just take them. They're hard because your teachers can be pretentious snobs about the class being an AP, the subject matter is not anything out of the ordinary in high school education. The only mildy difficult AP tests used to be Music Theory and Biology, they just changed the Biology AP so that it's now a joke like the rest of them. So that just leaves Music Theory which almost no one takes anyway, so who cares?
If you don't care about getting into the Ivy League schools and the schools around that tier, then it doesn't really matter what classes you take, so why bother.
Some more hard truths from a student in the UC system (2 years at Santa Cruz, next year at Berkeley, and summer school at UCLA):
It sucks. The UC system, despite being arguably the best public higher education option, is overpriced and underfunded. Sure, their graduate programs are the best in the world, but other than that it's really overcosted for the education you get as an undergraduate. Unless you're getting a full scholarship, I would avoid the UC system. But I am hardly embracing going to a private school, unless you can get a full scholarship. You should be looking to find a way to pay around $5000 in tuition a year, at a school that you can get out of in 4 years. Which means no state schools, as they are impossible to get out of in 4 years. I would apply to a shit ton of private schools and try to get recruited for swimming and then hope that you wriggle your way into a scholarship. Some schools like Harvard and Princeton have a no loans policy so if you get in they'll pay all your shit, so think about going to those schools. Though tier one schools really suck in terms of elitism, and the fact that I've never been impressed by the actual knowledge formations that emerge from those schools in the areas of Philosophy, Literature, and Economics.
Here are some actual good schools that you should think about going to, these are selected on the basis of me knowing people who go there and having a confidence that they are having a good experience:
1. Evergreen State, Olympia WA- no grades, amazing experience, low cost, beautiful campus, involved accessible faculty. Also Sleater-Kinney... Look it up
2. Reed College, Oregon- though they do have grades, they are de-emphasized and you will actually get constructive criticism from your professors. Like Evergreen, you will be able to have real relationships with faculty. Also beautiful campus and surrounding area. The cost is prohibitive as with all private schools.
3. Stanford- Yeah it's tier one, expensive, and elitist, and as far as I know it does not have a no-loans policy, so everything about that sucks. On the other hand, if you know people who go there, you hear their stories about going on field trips to Spain >_> Maybe I've just heard one too many of these stories, and have been illusioned by their fantastic gym, and now when ever I visit Stanford (which is all the time because they have a really fantastic piano program and the free concerts are amazing) I feel like Stanford is what college should be like.
4. Haverford/ other small liberal arts colleges (Claremont, Pomona, and Scripps specifically)- Yeah at Haverford you have all the fun elitism of any college in Pennsylvania, but you also have an honor code, which for a long time had me thinking very highly of it. My best friend loves it there, and when I have visited her there I thought it was lovely. But when I applied there, they wait-listed me
for no apparent reason (accepted at Princeton and Berkeley and rejected by Haverford? >_>). Look up there honor code, and really think hard about what you're looking for in your college experience, honor code is one of those things that can really mean different things for different people. Maybe it will affect you very positively.
