The complicated situation:
Ok, so in Taiwan (where I’m from and have lived/gone to conventional public school my whole life), secondary school is split by between 7th to 9th grade (middle school0 and 10th to 12th grade (high school). In middle school, my grades weren’t too bad, so my transcript for 9th grade shouldn’t be a problem.
Once I went through a long and stressful exams process to get into high school (10th grade), however, I realized how fed up I was with the archaic educational system in Taiwan that I basically gave up on regular schoolwork as a form of protest. But, at the same time, I realized that many international universities turned to SAT’s and AP’s or subject tests to evaluate a student’s academics. So instead of working hard in school, I worked hard on those instead.
I THEN realized, that even though my AP studies became more important to me, the fact that I still had to spend nine hours a day at school meant that I wasn’t devoting enough time to what I truly wanted to study, in fact it became a vicious cycle of failing school classes and not having enough time/energy to work on my AP’s (which I self-studied). So I applied successfully for homeschooling starting the second half of 11th grade.
So currently I’m a homeschooler. I’ll have official transcripts for 9th, 10th, and the first half of 11th grade, but homeschooled transcripts for the rest of high school (that’ll most likely be written by my parents who are both educators themselves). That means, the “official” transcripts will look awful compared to the homeschooled ones, and I’m afraid that’ll come off as biased or suspicious. My parents definitely aren’t afraid to be critical, it’s just that hated the system and curriculum before, and now that I get to study what and how I like, I’ve worked much harder.
I took the SAT for the first time on 5/5, and got a 1360. Won’t get my AP’s back until July but they shouldn’t be too bad (but I only took 2 this year).
Extracurriculars:
In terms of EC’s, Taiwanese students only get to choose one club to belong to, so I don’t have a lot of clubs under my belt, and even if I did that would just mean I switched clubs a lot and didn’t stick to anything.
Was chosen for a school volunteer trip to Thailand during the summer.
City Youth Ambassador.
Want to major in philosophy but hoping to be a filmmaker in the future. So far I’ve made a couple video projects and I’m a photographer for our school and also some club events.
Will be a volunteer translator at an international performing arts festival in October.
Other:
Have ADHD and mild social anxiety, hence was not highly involved in “leadership” except when I directed the short movies we made. That was the first and only time I felt like a leader and did a good job, so I’m planning to write my personal essay on that.
Planning on taking a gap year to build up some more AP’s and extracurriculars, and hopefully get a better SAT score (my absolute dream school would be Columbia).
We don’t have GPA scales in Taiwan.
All in all, I’m gonna try applying to the New School and Loyola Marymount this year, what do you guys think my chances are?
I know this was super long-winded and complicated, but if you guys have any advice at all I would highly appreciate it. Thank you so much!