<p>Well, I have been thinking about going to Stanford and I would really like to know if I have any chance at making it into Stanford at all? </p>
<p>My GPA is a 3.89 (weighted) finishing junior year and it is mainly due to the fact that I was very busy with my hobby that became something more than jus a hobby at the age of 13.</p>
<p>When I was 12, I began working on my Mac to see what I could create for fun or what exactly I could do with my new computer. I started learning how to code Objective-C for fun and soon enough, I created an app! I wanted to submit it to the App Store, but my parents didn't have money. So I decided to work as a waiter at my parent's small business in exchange for a $100 developer license to submit apps to Apple. After I created my account and everything, I submitted my app. (All of this happened in the beginning of 8th grade, I was 13) About a week went by and I got an email from Apple that my app was approved to be in the store. My parents didn't know much about what was going on, but they were happy to see me happy. I didn't know how to read sales the first day so I didn't know how much money I made. Since my app was $0.99, and in the records I thought I made 2 dollars, I'm not sure why. Well I was happy until I checked again and noticed that the "unit" number meant the total number of sales for that app. I recalculated and I had actually made $48 on my first day! It was crazy what I had accomplished and I was feeling happy thinking that beginner's luck had struck me. Well, the next day I woke up to check out my competition in my app's category in the store. i was stupid and innocent to think that maybe Google app or the Wikipedia app or the NatGeo app would be competition to me and my little app, but when I scrolled down to number 7 in the top charts, I noticed my name right there! My app had reached the top 7! I ran upstairs to my parents room and woke them up extremely happy, but they didn't really instant the meaning of it, and I'm sure I didn't either. I had made $210 that day so that was a shocker and the next day was $270 and it just kept growing! Until by the end of 8th grade, I was making hundreds of dollars a day. But I wasn't sure what to do with the money, I was only 13! I started high school, but I didn't start like all my friends. I was now running a business. I started getting interviews from many TV stations such as CNN International, NBC, Univision, Telemundo, and a bunch of others. Then people from all over the world began to contact me asking for business deals and I was in complete shock. I had been with about a year of experience in the "app world" and I was already a hit! Many owners of companies started to seriously want me to travel to their countries and have meetings over potential ideas. Soon enough, they wanted me to speak at professional universities in different countries! Since I was Hispanic, countries in South America also wanted me to visit and I was only in the 9th grade by then, just starting high school. I learned the ways of television and I began to strategize my interviews on different programs. And then when it came to me holding conferences at top universities internationally, I was once again baffled. I had to speak I front of about 2500 college students and what I was I going to say?! Well I just did what I knew best how to do and slowly I learned public speaking through that. Having a great opportunity if meeting many students from colleges after they heard me speak, I began to have lots of followers and admirers on Facebook and Twitter! It was something amazing and shocking at the same time! Me, a prodigy? What?! No... So that's how my life started for the beginning or entering high school and the interviews and conferences grew every year and became more prominent. Just last year, in junior year I landed a deal with the government of Peru to make their official tourism app and it is launching next month. They have posters ready and printing for their airports and everything. On the other hand, I'm traveling to Uruguay in the summer to speak at a conference in which and executive from Google will also be speaking alongside me. </p>
<p>Well everything seems to go great, but then everything changed halfway through the ninth grade. When the economy hit a new low for my parents, they had not saved any money. My parents had two small restaurants and had to give away one of them, losing everything with it due to the amounts of debt we had. Soon after, my mom told us that we were going to be evicted from our house and my life began to take a turn. I started bringing in lots of money from my business, but my parents had this horrible situation. So what started to happen? My money began being used up by debt. My parents had to maintain the small business because they never went to college and finding a job would be impossible. Calculating the actual income of the restaurant, I turned out to be about negative $4000 a month. And there was nothing I could do, except loan my money. Soon enough we reached a point where we had to find a place to move, and we found a small apartment to live in while I was working with my apps, I managed to earn enough money to pay for that apartment. And then my parents told me that I will have to be taken out of my school in junior year because there wasn't enough money coming in from their small business. So I took things into my own hands and became the father of the family, at the age of 15. I began paying my school and my sister's school. I started paying the rent for the apartment and the small business. Paying all the employees my mom hired and anything else you could imagine. It was great helping out my parents, but I was running out of energy and I just couldn't handle the pressure of maintaining a family at such a young age, which I still do today. Like anyone in the App Store knows, you have to keep making new apps if you want to continue making money, and I hadn't made new apps in a while because of the difficulty of making apps and studying for school! I was in the 11th grade when my counselor pulled me in and asked me, "What's going on with you? Your grades have plummeted. They aren't what they used to be. Your chances of getting into better schools is going away. Is anything wrong?" That's when it hit me. I couldn't hold it in any longer. I had to tell my counselor what was going on, so I did and he said that don't worry, we'll fix this, but you need to calm down. I was starting to go to my counselor every week to see what I could do. He suggested to become an emancipated minor, but he knew that the stress from the courts and everything would be worse for me at the moment, so we just kept pulling through. I never liked to talk to anyone or my teachers or ask for favors. And I had to go up to each of them explaining the situation and telling them what was going on. I felt horrible having to ask them for help, but that was the situation. My GPA at the time had fallen to 3.75 (weighted) by the end of the 10th grade and in junior year I was trying my best to bring it up. Now I'm finishing junior year and my GPA (cumulative) is looking like it could reach a 3.89 (weighted). I feel like I could have done more, seeing my Facebook with messages everyday from students all over the world saying how much they admire me and that I'm a genius and what not, but they didn't know what was going on in the inside. I took the ACT and SAT and I didn't think I would do any good either, but my college counselor told me that these tests were made to show your true intelligence. She said you didn't have to study for these. I was extremely relieved at the time because I was working with the government of Peru on the app that was to come out this March. When I went to take the exam, I didn't find it to be very difficult. Instead, I actually thought I did well. When my results came in, I had gotten a 31 on my ACT and a 1290/1600 on my SAT. My counselor said that was really good. So I was proud of myself, but I still felt like it wasn't going to be enough. I am now ready to apply to my colleges, but I don't know what to do. My dream is and always will be Stanford, but I'm not sure if it could happen now that my GPA doesn't represent me. This summer I'm traveling to Uruguay to hold another conference and while my outside look is happy and fun, in the inside I'm destroyed.</p>
<p>Do I still have any chances of making it in?</p>