Hi,
From eighth grade until the summer before my junior year, my mom was working in a town about 3.5 hours away from my house. She would come home about two weekends a month. I am the oldest of three girls and while my mom was not living with us, I took over a lot of the things she would do like making dinner, doing laundry, and picking up my sisters from after school activities among other things. My dad works full time (45 hours a week). This took quite a toll on my social life as well, since I could not drive for the majority of that time, I had to cut back on extracurricular activities since getting transportation to and from them was difficult (we live on the edge of town and my school is about a 30 minute drive, without traffic, from my house). My mom moved back last summer, shortly before my junior year started.
In hindsight, it also took a major toll on my grades. I took all honor classes freshman and sophomore year, and made solid B’s (one C for one semester in biology freshman year) but only two A’s in english. I am now finishing my junior year, taking all AP classes, in which I have made all A’s all year except for a high B in pre AP pre cal. I know college admissions will like the improving grades each year. My unweighted GPA will be a 3.0 at the end of the year, (which is very poor I am aware). To partially make up for it, I have very high test scores- 32 on the ACT and I am expecting around a 1400 on the new sat.
Are these circumstances worth mention on college applications? I am planning on discussing it with my GC, so she would be mentioning it in her recommendation letters, but for colleges that don’t need rec letters is it something I should talk about in the “additional information”? I don’t want to come off as whiny and I know some people have had much more difficult situations so I am not sure how to handle this. I feel like it is important to mention because it is the reason my grades have improved so much this year, but I am not sure how admission officers will feel about it.