<p>As a rising high school senior, I am a longtime College Confidential peruser, but until now, I've never taken the step to become a poster. I feel the need to explain my story so you can offer me any advice, and this is probably the first time I've explained a lot of these things... so this post is quite long. Thank you for any suggestions you can offer.</p>
<p>Recently, I have seen several threads with titles similar to this one on the homeschooling and college board, but no one on CC seems to have a situation similar to mine... So I wanted to raise a few questions.</p>
<p>I spent my freshman and sophomore years of high school at a competitive public charter high school in Oklahoma City, maintaining a GPA of 3.96 (for some reason, my school ranked each class-- even sophomores-- thus, my tenth-grade transcript says I was #2 of 92 students.) </p>
<p>Sophomore year, I was editor-in-chief of my school newspaper staff (we were a staff of 8; I spent a semester as a staff writer my senior year and blessed to be elected editor even as an underclassman.) That year, we took our schools journalism from a bi-monthly newsletter to a weekly newspaper: we redesigned, reported, raised money, recruited staff, and reported some more. On top of that, I was a sophomore senator to the Student Council or SGA, assisting with a charity project sending goods to Peru. Outside of school, I remained active in an acting and video production studio I have been a part of since the seventh grade and held a part-time job hostessing at a local Greek restaurant.</p>
<p>Beneath this laundry list of extracurriculars (the school newspaper was, by far, my favorite), there were a few problems with my charter school-- it was far away from my house, and my mom was making 30-mile round-trip drives (60 miles a day!) just to get me there. The college-prep slant ("Preparatory" is in the name) means that AP classes are NOT optional, but mandatory; I would never say that academics "weren't challenging enough," because I believe we are all ultimately responsible for our own educations, but AP meant something different there. I woke up many mornings and realized I was trying to get into college as opposed to learning, being curious, and LIVING-- and it all just seemed wrong.</p>
<p>Looking too far ahead, I spent hours poring over Fiske Guide to Colleges and Princeton Review's Best ... Colleges books, and made charts categorizing safety, match and reach schools, selecting my favorite liberal arts colleges. This all started in 7th or 8th grade, so you can imagine how (unnecessarily) bogged down I got-- and that's not supposed to happen until senior year!</p>
<p>I wanted to go after the things I was really interested in (better yet, find out what I was truly interested in), so I applied for a scholarship to a pre-college program at the Colorado College, a liberal arts school in Colorado Springs. My dad lives in Washington, DC, and we've gotten closer and closer over the course of the past few summers and wanted to spend some of the summer with him. Thus, I applied for high school internships in the DC metro virtually everywhere. Finally, I heard back from one: National Geographic KIDS magazine. I spent seven weeks there as an Editorial Intern, and made great friends; I wasn't the nameless seen-but-not-heard intern in the mailroom (sure, there was SOME phone-answering and mail-sorting.) I got to sit in on editorial and photo projection meetings and help judge a contest.</p>
<p>By early August in Oklahoma right before school was about to start, I was derailed by a problem with my thyroid and multiple cysts. With much more time alone in bed than usual, I began to question how involved I was in school versus how involved I was with my family and the city around me. In my first half of high school, I had painted countless banners for school spirit events in SGA and had cropped photo after photo in the newspaper computer lab. I had held a regular job and had several stints with volunteering and community service positions. But my school wasn't the place for me. </p>
<p>Instead of just transferring to an even further away suburban district, my mom and I began discussing how I could format my own education and still answer to someone. My stepdad was concerned with what he looks at as a lack of socialization and laissez-faire nature to high-school homeschooling. Luckily for me, dual enrollment of high school students in Oklahoma colleges and universities is common, as few schools have sufficient AP programs; Luckilier for me, my mom is a professor at a local Christian college with an "open admissions / everyone-gets-in" policy, making it comparable to a community college. </p>
<p>To structure my junior year, I read books for parents of teen homeschoolers and Grace Llewelyn's Teenage Liberation Handbook and looked at OK state high school graduation requirements. I self-studied AP English Language & Composition by Googling teacher's syllabuses from across the country and also self-studied AP US History using the University of California's Open Access course-delivery site. As the child of a faculty member, I got free tuition for six hours a semester at my mom's college: semester one, I took General Biology I (I'd already taken Pre-AP Physics and Pre-AP Chemistry) and Trigonometry (for math); semester two, Intermediate Spanish I (my third year of Spanish in my high school years) and Drawing. </p>
<p>In the meantime, I found a job with a local publishing company copy-editing manuscripts and working in the shipping & handling room for 20 hours a week. My Spanish professor holds down a foreign language translation / interpretation company when he's not in class, so I did some clerical work for his business on weekends, hoping to sharpen my Spanish skills. I put the money from those jobs toward room and board as I went to the Colorado College for another summer. This time, I took a three-week, four-credit-hour block class with college students, Beginning Creative Nonfiction Writing in Journalism, on a full-tuition scholarship. I made an A there, and LOVED it. As far as journalism goes, I hadn't done that much writing since my old school newspaper gig... Editing is great, but writing is more fun! I have spent the latter half of this summer working and taking part in a community theatre production of Hello Dolly with the same drama studio I've been with since middle school-- we've had three straight weeks of seven-hour afternoon rehearsals, from 1pm to 8pm.</p>
<p>But more than enough of all of that. Here's where my real question comes in. After self-studying AP Lang and US History for the course of my junior year, I took the tests at a tiny local science & math magnet which is actually housed in a defunct mall. Upon briefly discussing my unique schooling scenario with the counselor there, I found out that the school offers an online program which is usually used to supplement homeschool curriculums, help dropouts catch up, or help high-achievers get ahead. They offer diplomas and transcripts to all online students, and transcripts say nothing about the fact that you finished high school online; your funding is the same as the students' on the physical campus, so you are considered a full-time magnet school student. After the research I have done on homeschoolers' college applications and college admissions in general, I knew that you usually need a GED or an accredited diploma to fill out the FAFSA, and financial aid will be vital for me to be able to attend any (especially private) institution, so I talked to my mom about the program and she complied. For my senior courses online through this school, I will take AP Environmental Science, AP Government, Spanish IV, Pre-Calculus, and English IV. Then, dual enrollment at my moms school, I will take General Chemistry I and Intro to Academic Writing: Research and Argument first semester, and Calculus I and Backpacking second semester.</p>
<p>Because I have a traditional high school diploma, transcript, and counselor, and because my mom has little involvement with my self-studying (we never joined a homeschoolers association, or anything) I don't know whether I should apply to schools as a traditional or homeschooled student. So far, my combined GPA from my old high school, my college courses is 3.88 unweighted; I have a 30 on the ACT (my science subscore is VERY low, currently practicing that) and a 2110 on the SAT, which I hope to improve in the next couple of months. As far as the Common App goes, the counselor at my magnet school barely knows me and knows nothing of my extracurriculars, so I might have a problem there. Furthermore, if I do decide to take the homeschooled route, I don't know who should fill out the Homeschool Supplement. And when it comes to essays, I've thought about writing some of my central Common App essays on what taking my education into my own hands and my involvement on my college campus has done for my productivity, curiosity, and contentment. </p>
<p>Thanks for bearing with me if you've made it to the end. I think I needed to explain as much as I did so I could envision my past three-and-a-half year trajectory myself! Still, I'm in quite the conundrum as to what to do with my Common Application. Most of the schools I'm looking at that are Matches and Reaches-- Hendrix, Beloit, Grinnell, Carleton, Smith, Tufts and Bowdoin, to name a few-- use the Common App, and I don't know that any of them are known for being flexible with homeschoolers. If I don't answer this question for myself soon, I'm contemplating on only applying to my local state university, which will offer me ample financial aid based on grades and test scores alone. I have that fear I'm sure many college-bound seniors share: that I won't get in anywhere.</p>
<p>I am welcome to-- and would appreciate-- any advice or insight regarding my applications, my school decisions, my admissions chances or anything else I've mentioned here!</p>