Bad Junior Year :(

Applying to College
1

<p>I've always been an A student. I never worried about keeping my grades up, let alone passing all of my classes.</p>

<p>However, I completely screwed this school year up. Everything went normally until my grandpa passed away in December. It hit me really hard as we were very close. To make matters worse, my aunt and cousin were killed in a car accident in February. It's been awful. I missed loads of school and my grades slipped into C and D territory. My class rank went from 64 out of 503 to 101. I almost failed 2 of my 8 classes and didn't try as hard as I should have on my 3 AP exams.</p>

<p>I have very high expectations for my future (too high if I'm being completely honest to myself) and I'm crushed that everything seemed to go wrong during the most important year of high school. So, what I'm asking is how do I recover from this? How do I explain this to a college recruiter who has never met me and doesn't know my situation?</p>

<p>I'm positive I'll have a good Senior year. I'm taking 4 AP classes and I was recently named Editor-in-Chief of my school's newspaper (yay!). I'm just worried that it will be too little too late.</p>

2

<p>In the span of three months, you lost three family members. Nobody is expecting all As. I’m not sure how something like this usually ends up playing out in admissions, but as long as you explain everything on your application, do well senior year, and make sure to apply to plenty of safety schools, you should still be fine in terms of college admissions. Your guidance counselor should be able to help you with your applications and creating a good list of schools to apply to.</p>

<p>If you haven’t already, though, you should consider seeking professional counseling. This isn’t something you need to cope with on your own.</p>