I’m a junior and I think I bombed a few of my midterms and I don’t know what to do now. I think I’ve destroyed my chances of getting into a selective college. I currently have As in all of my other classes except for physics in which I now have a B-. I didn’t do so well freshman year and I did great sophomore year, but Honors Physics is just killing me right now. I also think that I did terribly on my AP Microeconomics and AP Literature exams.
Right now I’m incredibly angry and upset that my whole GPA could be sunk by a few tests and bring down all of the work I’ve done to. I really have no idea where to go from here. My strict parents don’t know yet either. Should I give up my hopes of Cornell now and just go to Penn State?
College is kind of like this — small number of exams, and you have to do well on them. Usially with some ringers thrown into the class who’ve had all the material and are just fine tuning the nuances while everyone else is working on the basics.
You don’t even have your grades yet. But you certainly want your college list to have a range of selectivity. Without knowing your full stats, no one can even guess at what your odds are at various colleges. I’d say keep working on develop a college list with a range of schools on it. Do your best in your classes this semester and study for your standardized tests, then consider your chances once all the junior year data is in.
Do you live in PA? Penn State admission with screwed up grades might be tough if you’re OOS. Anyway, what intparent said. Wait until you actually get your midterm grades back before panicking, You may have done better than you think.
Don’t give up in the middle of junior year! The end of year grades are more important, so just make a big push over the next few months to do your absolute best.
Thinking that you’re going to be disappointed if you end up at Penn State vs. Cornell is putting a lot of unnecessary pressure on yourself. If you end up doing a job you love, it won’t matter where you went to college. College is 4-6 years, but a career is 40+ years. In most cases, one has little to do with the other.