<p>Based in your description it sounds like you don’t have a lot of community service and not a ton of leadership. Your ECs are in no way bad, but they need to be great when you are in a situation where your numbers are low for a school and/or you are looking at extremely selective schools.</p>
<p>Don’t worry about your ECs. They are fine and if you enjoy them, which it seems like you do, when you let that come through in your essays, they will carry more weight then trying to load up to impress a college. For ECs to get you into a school, they pretty much have to be on the school’s wishlist, like recruited athlete, demonstrated interest in an area the school is trying to build up, national standings. Anything else is great but isn’t going to be a “hook”, and one doesn’t just create something like that. Your ECs will server you well.</p>
<p>Where you have issues is the difficulty of your academic curriculum. Look at the list of courses that the colleges that interest you like and understand that they want as high of a level as possible in those subjects. They like to see a student definitely prepared for calculus in college, all three areas of science, a good grounding in world and US history, and a heavy duty composition and literature background as demonstrated by rigorous English courses. They also usually want to see foreign language. If you are doing anything this summer, working on some project that will strengthen you in those areas and will move you up in your level to maybe honors courses would be good, Talk to your teachers and counselors about this. Ask how you can prepare yourself to do well for rigorous courses. You don’t need AP courses; but you do need courses that kids at your school take and then are successful at college. </p>
<p>One isn’t going to have to choose between community college and a selective school. There are shades of selectivity and any number of schools that are excellent but don’t have the name recognition. When you make your list of schools, make sure that you have a few on your list that you know your family and you can afford and that you know will take you. Then you can go to town on the rest of your choices. Are you going to need financial aid? Fordham, like many private schools, is terribly expensive. My son, though accepted there, chose to go elsewhere since he would have had to have commuted there to make it affordable.</p>
<p>Thank you cpt, and no, I would not require financial aid. And do you think maybe taking a summer course about psychology would be a good idea?</p>
<p>A good strong writing course that can get you into honors English for Senior year would be a good pick. Talk to your teachers and tell them you want to step it up a bit and get recs from them on what to do this summer to bring yourself up a level in rigor. There are many pre college programs out there that have some nice heavy academics in there. Make sure you get one of the teachers that are writng your recs has a cheat sheet where you can remind her that you wanted more rigor and came to him/her and made the effort to get it. Rather than a community college course, if your family can afford it, some program where high achieving high schoolers are taking some advance discipline is better. And use your ECs to show case what you do learn in those courses, like writing guides and policies for your activities, and enhancing what is out there with the skills you’ve attained. Most every academic discipline likes to see its student well prepared in the foundations, the 3 Rs, science, foreign language and history, but most heavily the writing and reading comprehension skills and math up to calc. The psychology, sociology, business, and other such disciplines layer on top of those basics.</p>
<p>I was only saying that, as someone who has been accepted to fordham, that your scores were too low. You might get lucky but I highly doubt it. Hope for a 2100+ SAT and if you could take some sat II’s and do well on those to show your not a slouch in the areas you want to study get at least a 700 on those your ecs are good.
Fordham-Reach unless you do what I said then I would give you a High Match</p>