<p>Hello all, thanks for checking my thread :)</p>
<p>So I have a question on how college admissions of top tier school (Cornell, Northwestern, Carnegie, Tufts) look at your background and conditions, as well as how or where (if I need to) to explain it in my application.</p>
<p>First of all, I was born Peru, and lived there for 13 years until I came to the US to start 8th grade (4 years ago). My English was not good, but through assimilation I manage to grasp a bunch of it through assimilation in my first months here (I also took English classes in my previous school, but they were very crappy and didn't prepare me). A tout three months in middle school, due to my proficiency in math I was put in the honor classes (including English) and a month later I was taken out of my ESL classes. Ever since I have been taking all honor classes but in the humanities, English and history, where I have to write a lot of essays, I don't do too well (usually B range, freshmen year I got A- in both English and world history, but that was my peak score in those subjects). Then in junior year I took AP Lang and US History, where I got B and B+ respectively (a 3 and 5 in the exams). In my SATs My highest score was 2150, 650 in CR, 700 in Writing (8 in essay) and 800. In math. While I understand, write, read and speak English, my mental processing is slow, which is why I can't deal with the limited time standardized tests and essays have. I also had to move a year later, so my freshmen year felt like I was new to the country all over again (had to make friends, deal with high school, and still struggle with English).</p>
<p>Something I want colleges to know as well is my family situation, which I think has lain a heavy weight on my shoulders, but wouldn't consider to have impacted my academic performance (as in, it has made my life difficult, but I try to separate it from school). I spent my childhood without my father, who live in the US. Once here, things didn't go too well. We had to create a bond that was absent for most of my life (and still haven't). Another problem was my fathers relationship. They always fought, even when he was away and talked to my mother rough the phone once a week. Around December of our first year in the US the two came to my room and told me they were separating, the next day they told it they had reconciled. Now I always knew that their marriage was bad, so that didn't surprise me. However, things haven't changed, and for all this time, I feel like trapped in the limbo of their marriage (they say nasty things about each other, and complain about the flaws of the other to me, and sometimes). To add to the problems neither of my parents has adapted too well to this country: my father who has lived here for 14 years still works in a crappy job despite having a college degree in engineering from my country (he works 12 hours a day to overcompensate this), while my mother doesn't have a job and misses everything she left behind to come here; both of them don't speak English well, so I have to be their translator most of the times, and have little to no friends. As I said, my father works way too hard (in a physically exhausting job) to keep as economically stable, but I constantly worry about it, especially now that I have to pay for SATs, ACTs, Ap exams and soon college app fees.</p>
<p>More info:
GPA out of 100: unweighted 93, weighted 99.81
Took three APs junior year (lang, physics, us history) and am taking 6 this year (CS, lit, psych, French, calc, stats)
Self studying for the physics c AP exam (not sure how to let admissions know about that as well)
Also my grades in ap lang and history got slightly better with each quarter, up to. B+ and A+ respectively, but the average (which I think is the only thing colleges see) is lower.</p>
<p>If you read all this, thank you :). I'm not doing this because I want to brag, get pity or sympathy or help with my problems. I just want to know if I can explain this to college admissions, or if it would sound just like excuses, wanting them to feel bad for me, or they would still expect me to do better.</p>
<p>As a side note, I heard that colleges compare you with your high school environment. Do they get to see what classes were available to you during each year? For example, ap world history was not available for sophomores until I became a junior, so I couldn't take it. The same year a STEM, which I would have loved being in, became available for freshmen. Do colleges just what my HS has to offer and think that I just didn't take those opportunities?</p>
<p>Agains thank you very much for whoever replies to this stressed and lost student :D</p>