I’m not really sure which forum to post this in, and it will undoubtedly be a long post, but I think that a lot of students (and maybe parents too) could learn a lot from my struggle. Perhaps those who feel down on themselves in high school or college might be able to feel a little bit more hope, because I could have used some inspiration when I was depressed. I also think that transfer applicants specifically could learn a little bit more about the complicated process, so maybe they don’t go through all of the issues that I went through.
I want to go through my family/personal history. Not because I need sympathy, but I want people to know that whatever is going on right now, it can get better, and you can turn it around <3:
My name is Phil, I was born in Moscow Russia, and my family immigrated here when I was 18 months old. We moved to Escondido (San Diego area). My parents wanted a better future for me because post-soviet Russia was bleak, depressing, and my Seventh Day Adventist family was being persecuted (I’m atheist though). The KGB even tried to recruit my mother to spy on her family because they held secret seventh-day-adventist meetings. When I was 6, my biological father walked out on our family (at that . He decided America was too hard, and wanted to go back to Russia, and his parents supported this. My mother never tried to get child support, she had too much pride. She became a single mother, and we moved around a few times, living briefly in government subsidized housing (in Carmel Valley though LOL it was probably the nicest subsidized housing in existence). When I was 10 or 11, my mother got remarried to my stepfather, who was much older (born in 1941) and also an immigrant, but from Canada. We then moved up to the SF Bay area, which is where I’ve lived ever since. At that point, I started middle school, and my stepdad would yell at me at least once a week if not more about how I needed to have straight As or else I was going to grow up to be a failure. He thought that a 4.0 is all I needed to get into an ivy league, and it didn’t matter if I was well rounded or had any interesting stories to tell. This continued all the way through high school, to the point where I was extremely depressed, borderline suicidal, and eventually almost flunked out. I technically didn’t graduate until the end of the summer because I had to do summer school after senior year (When I did finally graduate, I had a 2.3 UW GPA). I was rescinded from SFSU (my local CSU choice), and enrolled in community college, failing or dropping all of my courses until I dropped out in 2013 altogether (with a 1.105 CC GPA). I had already moved out of my parents house at that point, becoming what I thought was financially independent. I was pretty convinced I wasn’t going to get anywhere in life at this point. Besides my education, my health also deteriorated. I went from 190 pounds to 240 pounds in a couple years (couldn’t afford to eat healthy, and was too depressed to care). I got a job working in a warehouse, moved up to shift supervisor, and I was pretty sure that pulling myself up by my boostraps was going to be my life path. After watching me live paycheck to paycheck for a few years, my mother convinced me to take a business class with her at the UC Berkeley extension program. I had initially written off business as a career choice, because my stepdad was a business owner, and I hated him so much that I didn’t want anything to do with the whole field. And as a result, I was ignoring a field it seems I’m quite comfortable in, and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I ended up liking my business class so much I decided that’s what I wanted to get a degree in. I re-enrolled in community college in 2015, and discovered I was on academic probation (as a result of my 1.1 GPA).
This is where the life-fixing portion starts, and there’s definitely some takeaways in this part of my post.
I had to meet with a counselor every semester to sign up for classes, and this is while working full time 8-4:30 M-F. The first counselor I met with was extremely discouraging. He didn’t want to allow me to sign up for more than 1 class at a time, and he tried to push me to sign up for the easiest classes possible because he had no faith in me despite the fact I’d gotten an A in my business class at UCB extension. I decided I didn’t have time for his BS, and went to see a different counselor who gave me authorization to take 2-3 classes per semester. I decided to sign up for 2 because this was for the summer 2015 semester, and any more than 2 while working full time would be insane. My first semester was much more successful than previous years, and I got a 3.0 (I took an online class which was a poor decision, never doing that again).
That’s Lesson #1 by the way. Don’t let counselors/advisors push you around/make you feel bad. You can always request to speak to a different one.
Over the course of the next year and a half, I began retaking all of the classes I got Ds and Fs in. I filed for academic renewal, and my GPA started climbing, and in 1.5 years I went from a 1.1 to a 3.6!!! I got off academic probation, and that’s the GPA I applied with for transfer. My parents paid for me to have a private college counselor because they know next to nothing about the college process (immigrant parent issues). I did a lot of the research myself though. I came up with around 30-40 schools and slowly whittled down the list. I’d been with my girlfriend for over 3 years at that point, and we were determined to stay together wherever we went. We were 22 years old, and she had been there for me through all of this crap, and I was not about to ditch her. If anything, trying to find colleges where we could stay together helped me whittle down my list faster because we both ended up applying to schools in Boston, Philly, Providence, NYC, and Seattle. She was going to grad school on the Jack Kent Cooke scholarship, she already had a BLA from UC Berkeley. She ended up getting into literally everywhere she applied to (Harvard, UPenn, UW, NEU, RISD, Parsons, Pratt, MassArt, and Temple U) which gave me ample options for us to end up together. I applied to: CUNY Baruch, Rutgers NB, Drexel, Temple, UW, Seattle U, NEU, BC, Brown, Bryant, Bentley, Villanova, UDel, URI, NYU, Fordham, Clark, TCNJ.
This is where Lesson #2 comes in. I didn’t know, that for transfer students, some universities recalculate your grades and add back the failed classes you might have replaced. Some schools like Rutgers, UDel, etc gave me 3.0 and lower GPAs. If I had known this, I wouldn’t have wasted my time applying to them. It was really disappointing to see those old grades affecting me still. If you participated in academic renewal, make sure the colleges you’re applying to will honor that!