Thanks for the reply and as for my financial situation it’s about as depressing as it gets. I’m on free lunch, my EFCS’s a whopping $0, and my parents don’t make more than $30k a year combined: a lot of colleges, thanks to that, are immediately ruled out. According to net price calculators, for most the colleges I’ll have to pay between $0-15k a semester, so I’m going to have to hoard scholarships. I live somewhere in the armpit of AR and attend a school with a graduating class of 105 kids (it’s the largest in the area), with no community projects or theaters or service possibilities, and where going to school OOC is largely discouraged. I’ve only taken the ACT twice, 30 being my first and highest score, but I’m definitely taking it again, but I’m trapped unfortunately in the lack of any other ECs that would stand out on my transcript. I’m giving myself heart palpitations trying to keep my grades up: even though we have no AP classes, our school has this thing called “Pre-AP” which is advanced subjects. I’ve taken mostly all Pre-AP classes my entire career, luckily, but I’m not sure they’ll count for much on an application.