<p>I'm a little clueless about which academic records I really need to send to the US colleges I wanna apply to. Most colleges seem to want everything back to the 9th grade, but it's been like 8 years since I was in ninth grade.
I finished "Realschule" in 2001, then I went to a sort of high school for 3 years and got my High School Diploma in Design in 2004. Then I did a course from the federal job agency for about a year, and eventually started an apprenticeship in Media Design in 2005, which I finished in 2008. So I've got like 12 different documents, only some of them with really good marks...
Wouldn't it just make sense to send the final certification for each school I attended instead of all of them?</p>
<p>Also, does anyone have any information on translating academic records? Can I translate them myself and have them certified, or do I have to find a professional translater or something?</p>
<p>I will answer the easy part first: you don't necessarily need an official interpreter. When I applied to American colleges, I listed all of my grades for grades 9-12 on one sheet of paper and had that certified by my school (my English teacher had to sneak into the principal's office to get the school seal :)). Whatever you end up submitting, it has to <em>look</em> official (e.g. carry a seal or be printed on paper with a letterhead from your school). If you can get that from somewhere for a translation you prepared yourself, that works. Otherwise you might have to go with an interpreter anyway.</p>
<p>Whether or not you should submit just your final certificates or not depends on how
- high comprehensive they are, and
- how honest you want to be.</p>
<p>Colleges want to see every single one of the grades you got in school. If your final certificates do that, you can just use those. However, in my experience final certificates from Germany often omit a few not-so-stellar grades (my Abiturzeugnis only listed about 1/2 of the grades I actually got!). Now here's the honesty part: if you only submit your final certificates when they do not list all of your grades, colleges will most likely not be able to tell that some grades are missing.</p>
<p>I am curious what you mean with a "sort of high school" that awards high school diplomas in design. Fachoberschule in Gestaltung?</p>
<p>I am also curious what subject you want to study and for what class standing you would apply? (freshman, transfer, graduate school)? If you intent to study the same subject you did your apprenticeship in, you would be bored as an undergraduate. Trust me. Most first-year students in a media design major would probably start in the same place you did as a FOS student (assuming you did FOS), and the more advanced courses would overlap a lot with what you learned in your apprenticeship. American colleges also require you to take a lot of general education classes: English, math, history etc. College in the US in vocational fields is very much like a Ausbildung and not equivalent to a Hochschulstudium in Germany.</p>
<p>Thanks so much for the information! Do I have to send the German originals along with the translations, or do they only want the English ones? </p>
<p>I have "Fachabitur in Gestaltung", but I don't wanna study anything design related again. I'm still a little undecided, but I have a few ideas. I'm applying as a freshman for "regular" college.</p>
<p>I have an official translation for my Prüfungszeugnis from the IHK and used the same words for my translations of the other ones.
They used words like "good", "satisfactory", "sufficient" and so on...</p>