<p>Hi everyone</p>
<p>I'm a non-native speaker and International student and have studied outside of the U.S. all my life. The country I live in is very conservative and doesn't really encourage study of Humanities/Social sciences. I'm quite detached from these fields. More or often, I see that U.S. colleges emphasize a liberal arts education, encompassing all fields of study. And for that reason, despite becoming over aged and a novice to start with these fields, I've a growing interest over them.</p>
<p>What suggestions do you have for me? Not studying Literature and novels has crippled my English too as they are interrelated. I'm very bad with reading comprehension; it is very tough for me to search for an answer and I've to guess often. I don't know who Emily Dickinson or Ralph Waldo Emerson is. I haven't read any play of Shakespeare except for Macbeth (which I didn't understand too. I'm incapable of reading books due to my bad comprehension practices and drastically limits my understanding of complex sentence structures making me bored of many novels. This problem has also affected my standardized scores i.e. SAT Critical reading.</p>
<p>I've rarely written a descriptive/analytical essay on any topic. Creativity has never seen me through. To be frank, I've been an ESL student passing through all hardships that English is supposed to cause. I learn vocabulary but never seem to use them or even worse, forget them. I'm even admitting that my college admission essay was partly written and edited by my good friend (a native speaker). I excel in every subject I learn (the sciences and math) and have been the best student of my class. But English has seemed to snap my ears off. I've seen foreign IB students excelling in their theory of knowledge and other papers and easing the pain of being regarded as a 'non native' speaker. I simply don't get it why I'm incapable of achieving something which is becoming a norm today globally.</p>
<p>After such unsuccessful hurdles, I was very lucky to get into a top New England Liberal Arts College (due to its test optional admission policy). It was quite astonishing (taking my current condition into account) and hope to attend this fall. </p>
<p>But my question is, will I be able to cope up with the level of English in the U.S.? What can I do to get the English preparation of a native college freshman? Do I study SAT/AP English without taking the test? I really want to write like students do as in a high school newspaper. I'm really worried because I need to take english courses at college, which I may fail at and fear that my GPA will go down a lot. And I have high hopes for attending graduate school (apparently means GRE comes as a barrier again). </p>
<p>Sorry for writing a huge essay. Thank you for giving your time to read and answer me :)</p>
Well, I have a grave interest in Biological Sciences and would love to go to a LAC for the close knot community, small class sizes and the professor student bond. Sciences at LACs are great too and have heavy job demand and graduate school placement. Also, being an international student, LACs seem to award more financial aid and be more generous in terms of money towards foreign students which is a key issue for me.</p>