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Wow, you’re almost there!</p>
<p>Your post highlights the value of cc for high-school students who are in the freshman year (or even sophomore year) in many U.S. schools. The top schools have math teams and science clubs where older students can advise younger peers. But as we often hear from posters, many schools in the U.S. have nothing like this, and in that sense, young posters in American public schools sometimes need advice as much as do homeschooled and international students. </p>
<p>Sometimes freshman posters on the board have been told to just “relax, you’re too young to think about this yet,” but I’m always grateful when students and alums here step up and answer the questions. I’m a liberal arts professor, and my daughter attended a top public California high school, so you would think that she would not have needed any advice whatsoever. But I’m a historian, so I was pretty clueless about MIT. In her case, the fact that she joined the school’s math team when she entered as a freshman made all the difference. It was the older students on the team, the ones applying to MIT, etc., that mentored her. The fall of her sophomore year, she asked me to drive her to an MIT admissions talk based on the suggestion given her by a senior boy on the team (who attended MIT the following year). That was our first admissions session, and by the time she left, she had mentally mapped out all the coursework she would take, the SAT scores she would need to “be in the range”, and so on.</p>
<p>I can see how some of the CC boards can substitute for this experience in cases where students don’t know anyone who can advise them.</p>