Quick background - 18 years old rising senior, will be 19 when I graduate, black male, PA.
I want to keep this pretty short and to the point but in freshman year of high school I had a pretty bad medical emergency and almost died. Recovery took a while - first year of high school I failed every class because my school wasn’t exactly the most understanding and didn’t arrange for any kind of ILP or homebound instruction or anything. I transferred in sophomore year to an online school but health problems were still plaguing me. Things were better and I actually passed the year, though my grades were still bad thanks to spending most of my time in therapy, not classes. At this point my total GPA is something like 2.2 unweighted.
Fastforward to this year, the junior year - this is the first year I’ve actually been healthy. I finished this year with a 3.20 GPA with a disproportionately large courseload (caught up on extra classes so that I could graduate on time in 2016). I was on the honor roll for two out of the four semesters, was in the school’s Model UN and School Newspapers, and played hockey at a club/travel level. My problem is, that’s it. My cumulative GPA is still bad and it’s not like I’ve done a whole lot of extracurricular work either. One winter I did community service for a religious organization and this summer I’ve been working as an intern for a magazine based in NY. I’m pretty proud about landing the internship, but it’s still only one thing.
I took the SAT in June without much prep (exams happened at the same time) and finished with a 1780. I’m not sure if that’s completely accurate because my SAT test was the June 6th test that had a timing error. I might have scored a little higher/lower but some scores had been thrown out. I’m planning to take the SAT again in the fall, and after looking at my scores I’m pretty confident I can get them up to 2000 or higher when I actually prepare for it.
I’ve sent my SAT scores to Temple, Hofstra, Syracuse and Penn State (hoping to get into University Park or start at another campus to transfer there), as that SAT score right now puts me at least above the 25th percentile of people that get accepted at some of those schools and then in the 50th percentile of people that get accepted at places like Hofstra. Other schools I’ve been looking at are Maryland, Seton Hall, Rutgers and GWU, which I guess would be my big reach school. If I needed to declare a major right now, I’d say journalism.
I want to get honest feedback on whether or not any of this is realistic considering that colleges will look at my application and see only two good years and weak ECs. I know kids on this site with 4.0 GPA who have done everything short of cure cancer in their extracurriculars and they are being waitlisted at best at the colleges they thought were safe for them. I’m just incredibly worried that things are out of my control here no matter how well I do in senior year.
I’m sorry if this is a rambling or hard to follow post or a wall of text, I’m about to leave to do something in a moment and just wanted somewhere to vent and clear my thoughts.
tl;dr: I know colleges look at circumstances out of a student’s control, but I still feel like the fact that I only really had two “real” years of HS is going to work against me.