An 89 GPA is not bad. You might not get into an Ivy League based on that, but you can certainly get accepted to a very good, moderately competitive school. If you badly want to go to an Ivy league, you can always improve your grades during undergrad and apply for grad school.
I can stay up all night studying, get labeled as “lazy” at school and get into a not so great university in the U.S. + be in debt from that for the rest of my life
Or I can spend less time studying, almost automatically get in to the best universities in Russia, never worry about being able to pay for it and just generally have less stress and anxiety.
But I really wanted to stay in the US, travel to different states, learn more about the country, etc, however so far my experience here is not the greatest. My friends are jealous that I live here but there’s absolutely nothing to be jealous about. Being an immigrant here is hard.
I’ve never even thought about applying to an Ivy League school, it would be impossible to get in in my situation, although if I was born here I would probably want to apply there, the colleges are great.
If you only bothered telling your teachers what you’re going through, how you stay up, how English does not come easily to you, etc.
Yes being an immigrant is really hard. I think you’d really enjoy the books _ the new kids: a Year a international high school _ and _ hold on to dreams _ which talk about immigrant kids. You could start building your own reading list about immigrant coming of age literature and build your own story. Struggles make for excellent admission essays if you can reflect as to what they taught you.
There are LOTS of excellent universities that aren’t Ivy League. Read the book Colleges that change lives and borrow 'Princeton review’s best colleges '.
89 with course rigor is good. If you graduate from a NYS high school and major in stEm there are full tuition scholarships. With heop you can aim for elite universities in NYS such as Vassar, Colgate and Hamilton, and, if admitted, the state will pay full tuition and typically the elite universities cover part of room&board. see if you r family qualifies financially (you already qualify academically.)
I don’t think that I want to major in STEM. HEOP is for students who have grades much lower than I do, and my family is average and earns average amount of money, they wouldn’t qualify financially.
Actually HEOP is for students with all kinds of grades - they just have to have potential to succeed at a college and be under circumstances that kept them from showing their full potential (being ELL is one of them - whether or not you were enrolled in ESL).
For instance, your 89 is TOO LOW for Columbia HEOP, but right on target for Vassar, Hamilton, Skidmore, etc. If you aim for elite colleges, you qualify for HEOP academically. As for financially… If you live in the family of 3, your upper limit is 41K, which is middle class, and if you’re a family of 4, 48K. Ask your parents.
http://heop.org/guideline/
As for EOP, your 89 would qualify you for Geneseo and Bing.
What are you interested in for a major?
Unfortunately my family makes more than 41K
I am interested in International Business/Marketing.
How many people are in your family?
For international business (avoid marketing, as the postgrad prospects aren’t very good, unless 1° you’re in a famous department AND 2° you minor in statistics or data science or business analytics), the best college is USC Columbia. They have an Honors College with tough requirements, lots of essays that you’d have to prepare over the summer. You’ll know whether you have a shot after getting your scores back, because it’s top 10 for Honors colleges in the country. Also, merit aid is irrelevant of ciizenship (are you a permanent resident or do you have a visa?)
They’d sure love a student with Russian for a language.
Another option is the Russian Flagship at Bryn Mawr. They meet full need and are pretty generous, they’re quite intellectual, you’d major in Economics and study Economics both in English and Russian your senior year.They’re a TOP program that’s heavily recruited.
Another college where you could apply, depending on test scores, is
When do you take the SAT? May? And Subjects in June? Are you going to try the ACT (as some students do better on that test and I know the way questions are worded makes them easier than the SAT, plus they’ve got a science section and you seem good at science!)
Have you met with your GC in order to get LD screening? It’s mandatory if you ask, they can’t refuse. You have to explain you’ve realized you’re very slow at processing things, which is why it takes you so long to finish tests and write sentences. (You must say that, not just say “I want to get a LD screening”.)
(A LD doesn’t mean you’re stupid, not anymore than wearing glasses does. It’s just the way your brain is wired requires some accomodation. It’s not a stigma or some kind of sign you carry around in shame. And if you do need more time to process things you’ll get extra time. AND it’s not reported to colleges. You can self report to colleges… or not.)
Remember: American high school teachers prefer unfinished/unpolished/imperfect work ON TIME, to excellent/polished work late. Apply this now on.
My mom, my stepdad and I. My parents make more than 100K. I don’t think we will receive any financial aid.
I would prefer to study in northeast + Bryn Mawr is a women’s college and I would prefer to go to a coed college.
I’m taking my SAT in May and I will register for the ACT soon also. I don’t know anyone who took SAT subject tests and in school teachers and counselors don’t talk about them, so I didn’t plan to take them, since no one else does, but maybe I need to try.
I prefer not to do the LD screening. I don’t believe that there is anything wrong with me. My grades are higher than those people who received help from ESL. I’m still learning English language and that’s why it takes me more time to do good work than native speakers. Why do people here expect kids from another countries to be fluent in English at 16? I don’t think there’s anyone here who knows perfect Russian at 16. My Spanish class classmates’ Spanish knowledge level is lower than my English knowledge level. No one expects them to be perfect in Spanish.
Also is there any reason why being on time is more important than doing better work? It just doesn’t makes sense to me + I have a fair reason why my work is late.
There’s nothing wrong with you, but you need extra time and that’s a way of getting it, albeit in a roundabout way, since you were denied it in the “correct” “fair” way (ESL/ELL). Think of it as levelling the playing field and sorta of payback for people who’ve denied you something that should be rightfully yours - if you need to tell yourself something.
Being on time = you respect their order (you show them respect, you don’t think rules apply to others only because you’re so special, etc.) + American culture considers being on time, respecting time, understanding deadlines, as important. Time is external (constructed through calendars, syllabi, etc) and not internal (constructed by the task at hand and the person doing it.)
In some languages (Russian?), there are two words, one to indicate a “soft deadline” (ie., it’s an indication as to when the work should be done) and one word to indicate a “hard deadline” (all hell will break lose if the work isn’t done by that day/hour.)
In English, there’s just the one word “deadline”, the word that in other languages means “all hell will break lose if the work isn’t done by that day/hour”.
It’s sacred. If you don’t respect it, you show lack of respect and you do something that’s very bad in American culture. You have to respect the deadline. If you don’t respect the deadline… you choose to do something bad.
Think of something that’s very bad in Russian culture, but okay in American culture: how would you feel if an American did the very-bad-in-Russia thing, every day, for many weeks, and you had no idea that in America it’s okay to do that? Wouldn’t you feel offended, angry, perplexed as to why this otherwise nice person keeps doing this very bad thing? Wouldn’t you try to tell them? And when they’d say “but I have a very good reason”, you’d wonder, how can there be a good reason for doing such a very bad thing? …Well, that’s the same idea here, reversed.
This is cross cultural/intercultural communication. It’s NORMAL for bilingual, bicultural kids to encounter this. It’s confusing, frightening, maddening, but ultimately it’s what makes us richer, deeper humans.
At 100K, you’ll receive PLENTY of financial aid from top private colleges. Run the NPC on Skidmore for instance. 
However, it’s true you don’t qualify for EOP/HEOP. So, you’ll need to prep seriously for the SAT and the ACT to “make up” for the rest. Your score will matter a lot. In order to have a good score, you need to enroll in prep classes to get you started. Your parents make enough money to pay for a prep class with a tutor, perhaps a student who score 2100 on their SAT, or just enroll you in a Kaplan or Princeton Review class.
Although Bryn Mawr is a woman’s college, it’s part of a consortium with Haverford (which used to be the men’s college, but now is co-ed), Swarthmore, and UPenn. So, plenty of boys (including sometimes in the dorms), plus access to a beautiful, virbant, historical city and to thousands of top-notch classes.
Well,in this case, I guess this country is not for me and I don’t think it’s something I can get used to.
That’s a very close-minded thing to say. Of course you can get used to it.
Being pig-headed about deadlines will lead you nowhere.
Take advantages of the opportunities you have and follow the rules here.
If having a great paper matters to you more than the deadline, tell the teacher
“I now understand that in US culture, deadlines are not flexible, so here’s my paper.
However, I’m still working on it, so if you care to edit it, I’d very much like to write
a second draft.”
That’s it! Win-win!
For this year there’s no way I’d get my English average to be good enough. It’s already low, so if it’s 69 or 75 doesn’t make much of a difference.
It DOES make a HUGE difference.
75= good enough
69 = not good enough
And if you show the teacher that it was a cultural misunderstanding, that you were trying to do a GOOD job and you didn’t understand that deadlines are almost sacred and fixed in US culture, they’ll likely cut you some slack. DO what they expect you to do: turn in your work on time, and use the sentences I gave you in #93 to broach the topic with your teacher.
Wouldn’t it be great if you got a 75 for no extra work… even better: less work… just for turning in your papers on time?
It’s a shift in your way of thinking but it’s important for you to put yourself in your teacher’s shoes.
Decide that you’ll write down the date, then reverse-engineer the time you need to spend to get your paper done (even if it’s not great) by the deadline. Remember: respect the deadline, respect the teacher.
You’re not asked to approve this rule. You’re not asked to like this rule. Just take it as one rule that you have to respect.
(I’m sure that in Russia, there are plenty of rules you found nonsensical, yet respected.)
If your English average is that low and the rest of your class grades are as high as you have reported, then you do have the kind of disparity that calls for formal evaluation. Maybe it is an LD. Maybe you have a touch of OCD and/or anxiety and need help learning when to quit working on your papers. Maybe you just need a good talking to about listening to your teachers even though you don’t like them. Why this hasn’t been brought up by someone before now is beyond me. At Happykid’s school this kind of thing would have caused her to be hauled into the guidance office so fast the world would have tipped off its axis.
In any case, you do need to talk with your teacher(s) about what is going on. That way you will be set up for having better support for whatever it is that you find out you do need next year. There is a big difference between 69 and 76, and an even bigger difference between going into your senior year with a 69 from junior year (and the overall expectation that you will barely scrape 69 again in senior year), and going into senior year with a 76 and a recognition by the teachers that you need X, Y, or Z in order to regularly produce the quality of work that they expect within the time frame that they expect and the confidence that you will be pulling nothing less than the high 80s.
Teachers should expect this from American native English speakers, not from Russian immigrants who are still learning English. I’ve asked for help in my school many times, no ones has provided it to me. I guess I will have to go to a community college after all.
We’re not talking about 18 months from now. We’re talking about NOW. What you can do to help your case. Tomorrow, go talk to your teacher and say what was outlines in #93.
It doesn’t matter if, in your opinion, they should expect something else.
You MUST communicate your situation to your English teacher.
Or, are you looking for pretexts why you should return to Russia so that your mom lets you go?
My mom wants me to go to Russia to study in Moscow State University with my friends.