@Lindagaf I know its not all about academics. In my area, there are very few EC opportunities for homeschooled students. If there were, I would be doing them.
If you want to take more of a working-your-way-up path like this, why not study Finance at the Zicklin School of Business at CUNY Baruch? https://zicklin.baruch.cuny.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/majors/finance/ You’d be right “where the action is,” Wall Street wise, and if you achieved a 3.6+ GPA in your first two years, you could apply to their Honors Program https://zicklin.baruch.cuny.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/zicklin-undergraduate-honors-program/ and achieve upward mobility without necessarily having to transfer. Not to say I’m a wholehearted fan of setting up a 16y/o to live independently in NYC, but the same concerns would apply in Boston so why not go straight to the source if that’s where you aspire to end up? It sounds like your family has the resources to set up good support structures so… it’s an option.
What do you mean there aren’t activities for homeschooled students? What about babysitting, tutoring, helping with sports, volunteering at various agencies, helping an elderly neighbor with food shopping, gardening etc?
What about the local public school? Can you offer to tutor? As you implied earlier… those kids can use your help.
And once again I will tell you that no… you can’t learn in a long day what kids in public school learn in a month.
Oh, man. Not the old “No opportunities in my area.” Lol.
Many school districts are required to offer similar activities to homeschool kids. Whether or not yours does, the best of the homeschoolers forge their own opps. With peers, with organizations, internships, sometimes activism. Many find the right sorts of enrichment opps. They have vision and are activated.
If you’re from FL, there are many highly competitive kids applying to colleges outside the state. Their academics and ECs are full, in the right ways.
@aquapt Thanks for the info! I’ll certainly look into that school.
@twogirls You can’t get the complete experience in a day, no. I mean just academically, everything else aside, it is possible to do in one subject.
Since you still don’t believe me, i’ll get the math out.
An average public school student probably gets about 30 minutes of real instruction time a day in a subject, excluding things like managing behavior, grading homework and taking attendance.
One month may consist of around 22 (give or take) school days.
22 (days) * 30 (minutes) = 660
660 minutes is equal to 11 hours.
A homeschooler could take 11 hours and learn what a publics school student learns in a month.
@lookingforward for the most part, the op has gotten some pretty great advice. However, how are the snarky remarks at all helpful or constructive?
And yes, maturity does play a big part. Shouldn’t the adults on this site be mature enough to understand that making snide remarks to a 15 year old isn’t the best way to help said 15 year old?
I’m going back to your original premise, which is that you want to go to an elite college. In your rush, you are ignoring the most obvious and sensible option, which has been stated many times by numerous posters. Take a gap year and don’t just focus on academics, because the top colleges want way more than that. Figure out what the colleges want.
Top colleges will view what you said about having no opportunities to do stuff as an excuse. Where you live shouldn’t have an impact on your ability to think outside the box. You can volunteer in myriad ways, regardless of where you live. You can get a job. You can give music lessons. You can tutor. You can start up another successful business venture. You can try to publish something. You can help others. You can be an activist. Pay attention to David Hogg and Greta Thunberg. How about the achievements of Mozart or Bobby Fisher? All are/were young teens when they made their impact on the world. This isn’t to say you must make a global impact. It means you probably need more than what you’ve got.
You have said your parents are wealthy and supportive of you. Maybe they can do more to help you make the most of your homeschooling experience. Your job is to figure out how to maximize your opportunities in a way that aligns with the goals of the top colleges you aspire to.
@Homeschooler14 no, that is very important information and it needs to be included. Your age can’t be ignored.
Yes, I have gotten great advice. I know what gaps I need to fill in the year before I apply. I really should have just left my age out of this though.
Would colleges view it as a bad thing If I did some work for the National Youth Rights Association? I am passionate about the advancement of young people in society and youth rights in general. The thing is, the youth rights movement is kind of fringe.
Are the landlords in Boston and Manhattan okay with renting to a lone 15 or 16 year old? I wouldn’t count on it.
I’m confused by your posts. In your initial post you said you’ve already graduated from high school. Now you say you’re thinking about taking AP English and science through Keystone. So you’re not a high school graduate? The purpose of this thread was to see if your story – graduating from high school in a year – would help you get into colleges. But that doesn’t seem to be what your actual story is.
@austinmshauri Most are ok as long as my parents would be signing. NYC more so than Boston because many appartments in Boston do not allow undergrads.
Anyhow, this is really none of your business…
I have completed all requirements, but on paper I’m still in HS currently.
One final piece of advice I have for you is to visit the schools in which you’re interested and see if you really see yourself fitting in and enjoying 4 years there. Set up meetings with admissions to talk about your situation. Get a feeling for whether or not they see it as a positive or negative. And ask questions about dorm living at your age, see what the options are, etc. And look closely at the curriculum for your intended major and see what you think about it. There was recently a former home schooler posting here who was very upset about his college curriculum. He did not get into the types of schools he had hoped and was unhappy with where we ended up. He was used to doing his whole thing and was frustrated with the classes the school was making him take that he felt were useless and a waste of his time.
This is really the basic research all kids should do before applying and deciding on schools. You might be surprised what schools are a good “fit” for you once you start visiting and talking to staff and students.
“Age is just a number”
Age is not just a number. At the age of 16, even a year matures your brain (hippocampus) tremendously; your decision making and emotional capability. This isn’t us telling you, this is very BASIC biology; someone who has taken intro biology and psychology should know this.
“There aren’t any opportunities around me.”
You have a gift, a great gift of parents who allegedly make over $1 Million a year; study abroad, go to summer camps, use connection from your father to get an internship opportunity with one of the companies his colleagues work at.
Volunteer at a hospital? Are there no hospitals where you live?
“A homeschooler can take 11 hours and learn what a public school student learns in a month”
Public school students (and also most successful homeschooled students) aren’t learning that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
They’re being trained to think, to reason, and to apply - labs, research papers, and GROUP discussions. Do you have those? AP Sciences heavy weight application and unfortunately you don’t have a single AP PCB science test taken.
Colleges require you to have basic knowledge of PCB and those top colleges will need to know if you are up to par; usually through these subject tests or AP tests - ACT science isn’t science; it’s seeing if you can read charts and will not cut it.
You showed us your schedules, but I don’t see 3/4 years in a foreign language or any subjects tests taken in English.
Look, I’m not a perfect student nor am I a very good numbered one at that - but I can guarantee you, that what I learned in my four years during high school will be multiple times what you learned online in one year. Do not belittle a public high school education.
I suppose you won’t change your mind; it’s hard and I understand because you probably haven’t been outside your comfortable bubble of home and family.
At the places I work, volunteer, and research, you getting along is a top priority - being smart is irrelevant in this. If you aren’t likeable and come off arrogant as your are now, you will be grilled in “Real Life”.
Explore your community and go outside your bubble. Intern at a firm or a business company - see how you fit in in the “Real World” because the only experience it seems you have from what you told us are:
Talking with dad’s friends
Talking to Dad about business
Trading stocks on your computer
Self Learning
Playing Golf
Doing Music
@nomood
No, @Lindagaf is not being too “harsh” to a 15 year old - he claims it’s just a number and that he’s just as mature and experienced so he should be able to handle it.
@Homeschooler14, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.
I’m curious what is the REAL reason for wanting to start college so young?
Why have you decided that you WILL attend early, even if the schools accepting you aren’t real fits for you, even if you would experience social barriers/isolation in college? You would “settle” rather than spend another year as a high-schooler, developing ECs, taking more advanced classes.
WHY is this? Do you desperately want to leave home? Do you feel your life will be so much better at college (ANY college?) Or do you have some particular life goals you want to achieve by a certain age (which would be pretty ironic if that’s the case, given that you don’t believe that age makes a difference).
I’m not asking to be intrusive or critical. I’m sincerely asking if you’re doing this to fill some need you’re not getting in your present life that you feel you’d get in college. And wondering if there’s another way for you to get what you feel you need. Because I’m not optimistic that going away to college at sixteen is going to give you what you think you want, but something else might do so. And doing something you enjoy, that challenges you, might help you get the most out of college when you do go.
Second, I’d like to ask you why your parents won’t consider letting you do a year at a boarding prep school for bright, ambitious students, or a post-high-school/early college program, or a year-abroad program?
If your parents have no issues with you going away to college and living in an apartment at age sixteen, I have a hard time understanding why they wouldn’t support another kind of learning program away from home that could be extremely enriching to you (in a way that either your public high school or homeschooling is not).
It seems that money is no object for your parents, nor is giving you the freedom to live away from home at sixteen. it seems that prestige is not a big factor for them since they’d let you go early to college (to a less-selective school than you might have gone to if you’d waited).
Just for curiosity’s sake (I mean, what do you have to lose?), Google websites for “AFS” and “The Experiment In International Living” (well-respected semester/year/summer-abroad programs for high school students). maybe you’ve decided that that’s not your thing, but you can’t tell me that you wouldn’t mature significantly, expand your social/cultural awareness exponentially, challenge yourself academically, learn a language through immersion (light-years better than anything you can achieve in your online or CC classes) and be much, much more prepared for the multi-dimensional challenges of college by doing this, whether you’d go to France, Ghana, Argentina or Thailand. If you want to excel in finance or international business, you certainly can’t go wrong by becoming a person-of-the-world, understanding life outside of the particular bubble you live in (we all live in bubbles, not demeaning you here).
No one is berating you for your age, BTW. We’ve all been young. Our children have all been young, and we cherish our children at each age. What we’re saying is, savor and honor and live FULLY each life stage. That is the best foundation for everything that comes later in life. You may be an adult for fifty, sixty or eighty years. You have little time left to enjoy being a teenager.
whether op can or can’t handle it doesn’t matter. I think that op shouldn’t HAVE to handle it because the adults on this site should be mature enough to understand that a 15 year old is a 15 year old, and that harsh criticism won’t do anything.
I’m ready to take my academics to the next level. I’m eager to learn about finance. I’m going to force myself to be the top of the crop no matter what school I go to. I am EXTREMELY motivated to have a job in high finance and i’ll do WHATEVER it takes. (I’ve felt this way for a long time) If I stay in high school when I can get into a decent college, I am wasting time and energy.
You mention boarding/prep schools. Not only would I be wasting time and energy, I would be wasting my parents hard earned money.
I am religious as I stated before. I feel like god is telling me to go on to college to pursue my dreams and passion. Whenever I think about waiting until i’m 17 or 18 I get a sense from the lord that says NO, GO ON. You can make fun of me for being christian all you want…
@Homeschooler14, this is sad. No one has made fun of your religion.
I suppose I am not the right person to advise you, because everything within my being (spiritually and otherwise) feels that life is full of such multidimensional complexity, that wisdom comes from embracing the whole of it (though that’s not possible for anyone to do entirely). “Forcing” anything in life also feels counter to intellectual, moral, spiritual health or growth (to me). I feel quality is always better than quantity or anything rushed. I feel that anyone’s education as a “whole person” (whether that education is in a classroom or experiential) is more important than focusing so on one thing (finance). IF you feel called to use finance in a spiritual way to help the world (and I am in no way making fun or criticizing you, I’m saying this very sincerely) I think taking time to understand people, culture, history, the human condition along with learning your trade, could be most beneficial in helping you do so. I wish you all the best.
I would consider colleges local to you where you could commute from home.
You could get two years in, then transfer to an “elite” university after. I don’t think you have the credentials now for an “elite” university, though a regular university would probably take you. Often they won’t let kids your age live in dorms. Sometimes they require minors to live at home or locally with a parent.
OK, I’ll just add one thing to illustrate my thinking. Just one option of a myriad of options:
AFS offers a semester/year abroad going to high school and living with a family in Ghana. Lots and lots of devout Christians in southern Ghana (I know, I’ve been there) so you’d have company. I personally know a young woman (a devout Christian, home-schooled girl, btw, who was in ballet with my daughter) who did go to Ghana with AFS. You wouldn’t learn anything about the world of Wall Street there, but you’d get quite an education about a very different economic situation, and learn more than you can imagine how the world of international finance impacts people in every corner of the earth. It just might be eye-opening. And shape your understanding so that you can better use finance to benefit humanity rather than exacerbate greed (you do want that, don’t you?)