<p>If your English teacher can describe the school and talk about you outside your English class, it’s fine. I understand there’s no such thing as a counselor but the school profile etc. needs to be filled out by someone who can speak from outside their specific subject.</p>
<p>Gymnasiums, in American terms, are prep schools. Therefore, they prep you for further education of the highest quality offered in Germany, or offer you the most choices for your further education, right? Even if that type of further education is not called “University” in Germany, you need to find its equivalent. For example, your mother cannot be an occupational therapist without a degree. In the US, she’d have gone to college (she didn’t “improvise herself” into an occupational therapist, she studied, passed qualification exams…) so for the purpose of estimating her schooling, she has a college degree (not a high school diploma or no degree).
The “% of students who go to 4-year colleges” indication by the counselor is there to indicate how rigorous your schooling was. Was it academically rigorous or not? Did it prepare you to continue with higher education or not? By definition, the answer to this is “yes” for Gymnasium!<br>
If you will, “% 4-year college” doesn’t literally mean strictly universities with Level 1 degrees in the 3-5-8 Bologna agreement system, but anything that agreement takes into account that leads to a general degree and is even moderately selective.
What the form mean by “4-year colleges” is “selective further schooling”. Some high schools have almost all their students continuing on with higher education, some mostly in selective schools, others in non-selective schools (for vocational education, for example, like what in Germany is done post-Hauptschule, not post-high school), some will join the Army, etc. If almost no one in your school continues their education toward a degree, it indicates the general level of the school is not good.
If everyone who wants to do “Berufschule” can, if they just show up and they’re enrolled: then it’s non selective; but if Berufschulen select some students rather than admit <em>every</em> candidate, then it’s “selective”. Berufschulen or Ausbildung would be included in what Americans call “college” even if they’re not part of the German University system: American equivalent would be a 4-year Co-op program such as Northeastern or Drexel’s, and it’d be considered a selective, 4 year college – even if under the German classification it’s not a “university”, which if I understand right is for theoretical studies leading potentially to the Master. Even if in Germany the program is not in a University, if in the US it’s considered to be part of the college system, then you divide it up between the “selective” group (you need some form of qualification to attend) or non selective (you don’t need anything beside your certificate of schooling, i.e., Hauptschule is fine). You’re not describing in German terms, you’re describing in American terms, for American readers who want to understand what your system is the equivalent of in the US. Your counselor can use the German words and explain the terms in the profile, since some admission counselors will be familiar with everything, but on the Common App form, you have to follow the Common App American terms.</p>
<p>You will need to warn your teachers that they’ll receive an email to invite them to write their recommendation, in August. They can’t do it before then.
Even if the recommendations are written instead of being uploaded, they cannot be given to you; they have to be mailed directly to the school. In some cases you will have to collect them in an envelop with the back sealed and signed and place them in a bigger envelop, but that’s become very rare with the advent of electronic submission.</p>