I’m currently a freshman diving into my sophomore year of homeschooling. I’ve been working on next year’s curriculum for the past couple of months now, and I’d love to hear from anybody on here who homeschooled through high school and was accepted into a top-tier college as a result! We have so many resources available to us, and I’d hate to let them go to waste because I haven’t done my research. What kinds of courses did you do? Were you involved in some kind of co-op or umbrella-school-system or were you mainly independent? Did you participate in any programs that you feel gave you an edge when you applied? I have a pretty strong sense of what I want to do, but I want to hear from others who trod the paths I hope to follow in.
My children were homeschooled.
As far as college admissions, the best advice I can give is to look at admission requirements from the schools you think you want to apply to and gear your classses towards that.
For Ivy League the SAT, ACT scores will be very important. It’s not enough to get you in, but without good schools, those schools will more than likely not accept you. So prep early, maybe take a class.
Your classes should be challanging. You can show this by either taking AP classes online or doing dual enrollment with a local college, etc… If you make good grades in those, it shows you can handle college level work.
What are your interests? Plan on doing some origional research in an area of interest. It wouldn’t hurt if you could enter that research in a national competition - I liked the Young Epidemiology Scholars Competition. A whole class can be created around this.
Be active - clubs, sports, volunteering, etc… It’s not how much you do, but rather if it all sounds like it “goes together” - you are resume building. So, if you think you like theater for instance, you should take drama, audition for plays, volunteer at a local theater, maybe try writing a play and enter it in a contest. Do you see how a resume that is focused like this stands out better than a laundry list of random stuff?
If you are interested in business - join a business releated club, maybe if you are in boyscouts or girlsouts - work on a project realted to showing younger children about business. Develop your own business. Get an intership over a summer at a local business. etc…
Medicine? Volunteer at a hospital, enter a science competition, try to get accepted to a summer program that focuses on medicine, join a science club, etc…
Some concerns that admissions have about homeschoolers are:
- Are they social? will they fit in to the campus environment? (clubs show that)
- Can they do real college work or is their homeschool transcript grade inflated? (online classes, accredited curriculum or college classes show that)
- Will they contribute to the campus community? (again, clubs, your origional ideas and community envolvement).
- Are they sheltered? Homeschoolers are sterotyped as being overly religious…do your activities show that you socialize with a variety of people or just one group of people?
- Did they use a watered down curriculum? provide a list of all textbooks used (with name, publisher, date,) also I recommend sticking with standard publishers - Glencoe, McGraw Hill, Pearsons, Prentice Hall, etc…
Good luck . Also, keep an open mind. You don’t have to do Ivy League to get a great education.
Also, smaller colleges are more willing to look at your portfolio…large universities sometimes only want to see test scores (because it is easier for them to evaluate) - some require the SAT or ACT and up to seven Subject Tests.