To make an incredibly nuanced situation incredibly short: for nearly my entire high school career as well as my early community college career, I grappled with mental health issues that wreaked havoc on both of my GPAs. I’ve since made a full turnaround with the aid of therapy, but I’m haunted by the specter of those older days and I fear it’s too late for me to be able to transfer into any of my dream schools, no matter how well I do going forward. I’ve retaken all six(!) of the courses I did poorly in the first time around and have gotten A’s in all of them, but I see now that some schools (like Northwestern, which I once had my eye on) won’t even accept credits for retaken courses from transfer students.
My SATs are decent (1400/2110), but my high school GPA was something like a 2.6 unweighted and I’m pretty short in the extracurricular department as well. I’m in the process of working on the latter but some direction in that department would be greatly appreciated (assuming it’s not entirely futile). Is there anything else I can do at this point?