Guidance Counselor = frustrating

<p>Ahh, no one in my school takes me seriously! Here is my situation: I am a sophmore in my second semester, and I worry way too much about colleges. We had our Guidance meetings about colleges, and she asked me which were my top choices as of now. I told her UcB, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, and then my reach schools were Stanford and (huge reach) MIT. SHe kind of laughed and then asked what my junior courseload is. I told her it is:</p>

<p>AP US Hist
AP Bio
AP English 11
Honors PreCal
Honors Physics
Honors German III
Religion (Catholic school, required)</p>

<p>Once again she kind of laughed and asked me what I am really taking! I was so taken back, but I told her I was serious. She went on saying I need a social life and all. I told her I do have a social life, but am more focused on keeping my grades up. A very similar thing happened between me and my math teacher. If I could, I would be taking 4 AP's, but my school doesn't let me. Will I be able to handle three AP's? According to my counselor, I will not. I am an A student in all the highest classes, with the occasional one B+. PSAT after freshman year was 1950. THanks!</p>

<p>There are plenty of students who take even tougher courseloads than you're considering. My advice is to have your parents accompany you as you talk to your GC. That may help your GC take your plans more seriously.</p>

<p>Unless your APs are insanely hard, you'll be fine. I got a 189 freshman, 208 sophmore, and 226 junior on PSATs, so your probably better than me with a 195 freshman, and I have no trouble with AP Calc, AP USH and AP English 11 as a Junior. Your guidance counselor might need some convincing, so just talk to her/him with your parents. Good luck!</p>

<p>thanks! Now how do you all feel about self studying an AP course....</p>

<p>My guidance counselor is the same and it's stupid because we have block scheduling so it's only 4 classes a day to worry about. I tell him APs I want and he says "Well, you see, you need to have more relaxing classes." I tell him fine, Journalism and Statistics for easy classes. He goes," You see, those classes still give homework. Pick some that don't give you work to take home." He makes me take keyboarding. He never let any junior take more than 1 AP. I got AP calc, but he was resistant to that idea. I'm so scared when I go in this year and want like 5 senior APs that he'll kill me. Even though 5 Aps would still leave me with gym and 2 easy classes. Man, the guidance dept. is ridicuolous. Especially because he'll put forth an effort so I have one killer semester with 4 hard Aps and 1 easy semester with gym, 2 electives, and the lightest of my Aps. I guarentee that because that's what he's done every year. I get lit, history, and math along with either an honors language or another hard class one semester and gym, science, and 2 joke classes the other semester.</p>

<p>You should have seen the fight I had with him over rather stats was an elective. He though it was a stressful class. I let him now that it wasn't even AP (our school doesn't have AP Stats) and he got so ****ed.</p>

<p>When I was selecting courses for my senior year, I showed my selection sheet to a counselor and he was like, "I see you've signed up for 5 APs...wonderful! I love it when you guys challenge yourselves."</p>

<p>Your schedule looks pretty much like what I took junior year, except I took AP Art and Honors Chem instead of your sciences, and I was in Spanish II. It looks completely manageable, unless AP Bio is insane at your school.</p>

<p>EDIT: I think I am also going to start self studying AP computer science A over the summer! Not to worry, I already know java pretty well so it shouldn't be too hard.</p>

<p>Take what you want. The choice is yours, not the GC's. I disregarded my GC's advice in high school and nothing happened. The first semester of physics conflicted with pyschology, which I also wanted to take. So I took psychology, then transferred into physics second semester. The GC freaked and said I was sure to fail. I studied the text before second semester and ended up as the top physics student that year.</p>

<p>Actually, I think proving a GC wrong is a great motivating factor to doing well!</p>

<p>When I pulled my daughter out of public school to homeschool her, the school tried to give me all sorts of advice as to what to teach and how to teach her, specifically recommending against doing what I planned to do. I paid them no attention and she is now doing fine at an Ivy.</p>

<p>Looking at your plan, my only concern would be doing both AP Bio and Honors Physics in the same year. But I don't know how demanding the latter is at your school or if you are the type who reads a science text and just gets it and remembers everything. If you have talked to people and know what the courses are like and think you can handle them, I have no reason to doubt you could!</p>

<p>Best of luck.</p>

<p>THanks, and Honors Physics is required for AP Bio and AP Chem, both of which I could've taken, and for no real reason I just decided to do AP Bio junior year, and AP Chem senior year. And yeah, once I read something, I can pretty much remember it. Not that I like doing that, but hey it works :) Thanks for all ofyour advice!</p>

<p>That is true, but I also understand the frustration about GC, we have a similar problem, they didn't even care that my S scored 1390 on the SAT in 7th grade (October).</p>