<p>Hello all, I'm currently a junior and was wondering how to go about explaining a poor GPA? I did well my freshman year, earning a 3.8 GPA taking 3 honors, and this year/the next I'm hoping to maintain a GPA around that level taking roughly 7-10 AP classes by the end of my high school career. However, my sophomore year my father was very ill and I thus had to miss 14/15 days of school. My GPA suffered obviously, taking 3 honors and 1 AP, and it's going to bring my cumulative down a lot...I'll have a 3.3 if I'm lucky. However, my ACT/SAT scores hover around 30/31 right now (hoping to bring it up), and my extracurricular activities include four years of cross country/track, 4 years of mock trial (state champs), 4 years of school newspaper/yearbook, and my 100+ community service hours per year. My question I guess is that if colleges will actually care about my reasoning or just simply think I'm not smart enough? I'd like to be able to talk about it a little in my essay or something, but I'm not sure how they'll take to that? Can anyone help me out on how a certain school might take it? </p>
<p>Schools I'm looking at: Ohio State, Indiana, UK, Clemson, South Carolina, NYU, Cornell maybe, etc.</p>