I admire you for your persistence and your strength.
If you were my child I would let you know first that regardless of your GPA you will be okay. You are going to have a wonderful life filled with opportunity and so many good things. Even if you don’t attend any of the schools that are in your list, you will have a wonderful, happy life. And you will be successful. Guaranteed.
Second, I would strongly recommend to my child who felt as you do to look for the off-ramp into a slower lane for awhile. This can help you recover from the stress and the inevitable anxiety and depression that stress causes. There are so many ways to move forward in the world toward your future. Many many ways. As many ways as there are highways and roads. To overuse the highway metaphor a little longer: often schools and parents get stressed out about keeping students on that single lane speedway: GPA/SAT/ACT scores! Well-meaning parents and schools forget that many successful people – often the most successful people – messed up high school entirely.
To gently nudge my child into a slower lane I would introduce to her/him two ideas. The first is that getting rid of the stress is much more important than any grade. I would let them know that even if they failed all of their classes, they would still go on to have a happy and fulfilling life, very successful careers, and they would thrive.
Second I would introduce the idea of taking time before attending college. I don’t just mean a gap year. I mean a gap however-long-you-want. As long as you don’t complicate your life by getting married or having children, you can take a lot of time to explore careers and try living on your own, traveling, for as long as you want, and then when you’re ready, attend college. I’ve listed a few resources below for you to explore this idea further.
You seem to be in CA so at the very least you have the CC-to-UC path available to you. You can ostensibly take all the time that you want between HS and college and then start at CC and transfer into the UC of your dreams. In addition to that, many private schools have pathways for “nontraditional students.” Many schools welcome the nontrads onto their campuses because nontrads offer different perspectives and talents from the traditional freshmen. From your username I am guessing that you’re female. Many of the excellent women’s colleges have special pathways for nontrad students, with special status and endowed funding: Wellesley, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Agnes Scott. Yale has a nontrad program, as does Brown. Columbia and UPenn have nontrad programs (entire schools devoted to nontrad students) but I think the financial aid for those two schools is not as good. Cornell offers ample opportunity for CC transfers in. Hampshire College, Reed, and MIT all offer pathways. There are so many other schools with nontrad opportunities and pathways.
The people I know who have taken the nontrad path have thrived once they got to college because they had a chance to get out into the world, which gave them so much experience and confidence. They also had time to physically and emotionally mature before attending college. Once they got to college, they were ready to tear things up (in a good way), much more so often than the freshmen who still were trying to figure out so much socially and how the world works outside of the home. The nontrads also seem to have done as well or better in their careers – with greater confidence and focus that they got from their experience.
See next post for possible places. Too many links flags posts for moderators.