I was always a good student in Freshman and Sophomore years. Then after a death the family, diagnosis with a painful micro-tic, and other events leading to depression my grades plummeted. I used to have a 4.3 GPA but it dropped to a 3.7 after the first semester of junior year and I failed a class. However, I’ve gotten the help I so desperately needed and I am now back on track at the end of third quarter of junior year but I now also feel completely trapped. I always wanted to get into a high-level or Ivy League school and am now doing all I can to salvage my seemingly mediocre high school career. I already have 2 AP credits and I am working intensely hard to bring all of my grades up to A’s or A+'s for last quarter and plan to do the same for my Senior year which I understand is not quite as important but I obviously f*#@ked up Junior year mostly. I am taking Pre-Calc over the summer to get into Calculus next year. I am taking 2 AP classes my senior year. I’m taking AP Stats and Honors physics online and I’m planning on taking at least 1 or 2 other honors or AP classes online. I’m also studying 20+ hours a week for the ACT and plan on retaking to SAT (first score: 1210 out of 1600) to raise my score at least 200 points. I’m also interning at a local company, Pixel Media Inc. (the company that designed Harvard’s website :P) to learn about business management along with a part-time job. I also founded the Ultimate Frisbee club at my school, member of the National Honors Society, Ambassador for the National Society of High School Scholars, and am in the process of beginning a scientific study with a local university. I am doing this all to try to make up for my past failures and plan on brining my GPA back up to at least a 4.2. Will this be enough to get back to the Ivy/ High-Prestiege level I want to be at or will my past failures in Junior year be something I can never come back from?
I think it will be hard to bounce back, but not impossible. Think about it this way: there are thousands of kids every year who apply to high prestige schools with good stats and very little else to distinguish themselves. They are looking for someone with a story, not just a certain number. If you can show the admissions office you are the kind of person who doesn’t let a failure keep them down in really concrete ways, that counts for a lot.