<p>Hi everyone :)
I am 22 years old and I'm from Brazil. I started thinking about studying in the U.S. very recently and quickly realized I'm not a traditional student. Let me explain.
Here in Brazil the application process in totally different. Each University applies their own tests (which usually covers portuguese, english, math, physics, chemistry, geography, history and biology) and whoever gets the highest scores at those tests get the available positions. Which means we don't have to write essays, schools don't care about our backgrounds, your scores at those tests are the only thing that matters. So, after high school, some of us continue studying to try to pass those tests. I studied for another two years after high school (those two years don't count as high school nor as college) and got accepted in a bunch of different colleges every year, except for the one I wanted, which was a military school. So after two years I let go of that idea and finally decided to go to a top 3 University here to study electronic engineering.
But that's the other thing. Here we have to chose our majors before we get in and switching to a different major is not simple. So by my third semester I decided I didn't like engineering and wanted to switch to Geophysics. So I quit engineering for a year and took another one of those tests a year later and this time I got in the best University in the country, the University of S</p>