Check on your home state’s residency requirements, first. You may qualify as a state resident, even if not a citizen, if you attended high school within that state for at least three years. You sound perfect for many smaller, liberal arts colleges. I would have also suggested UC Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies, but they are expensive for out-of-state. Smaller colleges are often test-optional, and your application will receive a more careful, individualized review. You and your adviser can speak directly with admissions offices to explain your circumstances. Syracuse is terrific for art, and can be pretty generous with scholarships. Will you need a full scholarship, or can your parents contribute toward your education? I will give you the same advice I give many students on this site: do not pin your college dreams to an unlikely increase in test scores. You will undoubtedly hear people exhorting you to drop everything else and devote all your waking hours between now and December prepping for and re-taking standardized tests. You will probably encounter one or two posts from students who pursued that strategy successfully. I will tell you to put your fingers in your ears and chant “LALALALALA!” By all means, do some on-line practice tests. Take a prep book out of the library. Also, consider the simple facts. No student has ever re-taken the SAT without hoping to improve his or her scores. The College Board has a vested, financial interest in encouraging students to re-take them, and these are their statistics. The majority (55%) of students who retake the tests will increase their scores. Ten percent will remain the same. Thirty-five percent will have a decrease. The median increase for test scores is about 50 points, across three tests. That means that your scores are likelier to fall than increase by more than fifty points. Try the ACT at least once. Re-take the SAT once. Beyond that, work on the art that you love, and assemble a great portfolio (ideally with the assistance of a teacher or mentor). Work on the supplementary essays that many test-optional colleges require, so that your fascination with physics and passion for art come through. Do your best in school and focus on what you love. I say this as a parent whose sons both exceeded the norm and improved their SAT scores by over 150 points (3-scores). The elder barely prepped. It was almost all a matter of hitting the Critical Reading test out of the park on the second try. The younger took some vocabulary books off the hands of graduating seniors and did a few more practice tests. Neither one considered dropping an extracurricular activity, summer job, vacation travel, etc. to achieve those increases.