Hi I would like some advice on a current struggle that I have. Basically I was a transfer student from the UK last year. So I came into Princeton High School as a Junior. My old school followed the IGCSE curriculum with a completely different grading scale used based on difficulty of our courses. All my courses were Top tier including (math extended/honors, French, English, Science and History…) and I was one of the strongest academically in my classes(I even won awards in stuff). The Grading scale used was (A=80-89, A*=90-100, B=70-79), but all my classes were very hard as it follows the Cambridge/Oxford curriculum. All of my grades freshman and Sophomore year were A’s. But when I transferred to the US, my new school didn’t convert my grades using the same grading scale, So on my transcript it appears much lower. So at the moment my GPA is a 3.20 and because I also had a lot of struggles between Junior and Senior (my grandpa died, got very sick) I missed the ACTs and couldn’t afford for tutoring and when I took it I got a 20. I have a lot of safety schools, but my top schools are Stanford, USC and Pomona for their International Relations program. Because I established a Leadership academy for youth back home in Cameroon, and I am working with government officials to start a STEM program for young girls and I am also developing a business plan for education. I am a very strong student in History and Language (got a 5 in AP French and a 5 in AP World, and a 4 in AP Macroeconomics). But I have written a strong essay about my experience with racism, and another one in the additional comment section about my transcript, but I would just like to know that do I stand any chance of getting in these schools? is it worth applying?
You can apply, but you must understand that these schools are very competitive and if your stats don’t match up, you’ll have a very tough time getting in anywhere.
Additionally, based on your writing of this post, I would have to agree with your ACT results. I had trouble reading this post. If you are a second language speaker, I understand that English can be difficult and it doesn’t have consistency in its rules for grammar.
Written language skills, however, must be strong to do well at these universities.
Unfortunately, your writing shows prevalent errors in sentence formulation, subject-verb agreement, the overuse of conjunctions, lack of paragraphs, and multiple sentence fragments, as well as run-on sentences.
You may want to focus on getting tutoring for your writing skills, since your ECs will not help, if you can’t write a cohesive sentence or paragraph.
No, wait. This isn’t the writing that I’m giving to colleges. I already wrote something official that was proof read by my teachers. This is just me explaining my situation on college confidential, and asking if my case is valid?
I’m a native speaker, its just that I was typing from my phone and some of the words were messing up.
for ECs I am the leader of an Acapella group, VP of the Black Student Union and leader of the French Club. Plus I have also been class president twice and I volunteer as a youth advisor at my church every Sunday. I also have a part time job at a Pizzeria. So I’m not sure if that is enough ECs.
I was just typing with my French phone and didn’t recognize some of the words, that’s why they appear wrong on this post. I am a Native English speaker in AP Lit. I was just asking, if colleges will acknowledge the my case because it is different from most students in my school.