<p>I just finished sophomore year with straight As both first and second semester (all of my core subjects were honors, except for history which was AP Euro), but my freshman year grades were awful. I've been bullied since 1st grade; I was literally alone throughout elementary, nobody wanted to hang out with me. I would eat lunch in my classroom with the teacher or just do my homework because nobody wanted to be my friend. Ever since then people have been saying that there is something wrong with me, I'm a waste of life, and a lot of other really harsh things that I don't want to go into detail about. Up until summer after my freshman year I started to believe it. Since 7th grade I've been having a lot of family problems, mainly with my mom. And on top of that my transition from middle school and high school wasn't easy for me at all because the honors classes at my middle school and the honors classes at my high school are totally different. I didn't have a huge workload in middle school even though I had all honors as well (heck, they shouldn't even be called honors classes, they were more like regular classes) so when I entered high school with all honors I wasn't prepared at all. The ridiculously huge workload on top of all of my problems was definitely not helpful. After talking to a counselor for two years (even though she didn't do much, I had to learn how to deal with stuff on my own) I've managed to teach myself how to cope with everything and learn to just ignore negativity.</p>
<p>Since freshman year I've been volunteering for quite some time now and I have over 300 service learning hours. I was also the captain of my school's basketball team, and I'm signing up to take basketball again this year (I've been in love with basketball since middle school). In addition, I take dance classes (ballet, hip-hop, break dancing, contemporary, and I take this gymnastics class as well to help strengthen myself for dance), Sophomore year I participated in spirit week at my school by performing 3 dances, for as long as I can remember I've been belly dancing (I'm Assyrian so I picked up on it from weddings, and my mom taught me how to), and I've been assigned as the choreographer for the contemporary dance performance for spirit week this upcoming year (spirit week is during the middle of October, so my school always starts preparing for it a few weeks before school ends). Dance was one of my ways of relieving stress and it helped me learn not to focus on negativity. I'm also really into superheroes (you know like D.C. and Marvel). I've been collecting comic books for about a year now, and I've been obsessed with physics ever since. Because of my obsession with physics, I'm taking AP physics this upcoming school year (along with AP psychology, honors pre-calculus, AP English, APUSH, and AVID (I've been in the AVID program since freshman year, I plan on taking it senior year as well). I also take an online language class, currently I'm taking my 3rd year of French and received As my first and second years. I have more extracurricular activities that I could talk about but I don't want to go into too much detail about them because I don't want to make this question incredibly long (I think I already failed at that though).</p>
<p>My dream college has been Stanford, I've wanted to go there ever since I was in 3rd grade. I live in the Bay Area so I visit Stanford's campus a lot, and every time I step onto the campus I know it's just the perfect college for me. I'm really interested in engineering as a major (kind of relates back to my obsession with superheroes, it was mostly Iron Man that got me interested in superheroes, hence the engineering and physics interest) so I went on a field trip to Stanford where they had this engineering event. The field trip was mostly a workshop sort of thing, we went to about 3-4 classrooms on the campus and learned about various kinds of engineering (the workshop I remember the most was learning about stem cells, it was kind of advanced because a junior at Stanford was teaching us about the subject, but I understood everything she was explaining).</p>
<p>Anyway, sorry for going off topic a little bit there. I was wondering if my depression and the cause behind it would prevent me from getting into a good college. Would my improvement during sophomore year make up for it somewhat? If I explain my depression, would admission officers not consider it a good enough excuse for bad grades? And also, if I continue this upward trend during junior and senior year, get amazing test scores, and continue with my extracurricular activities, will I at least have a chance of getting into a good college?</p>