Greetings everyone,
I’m in a pretty tough situation, and is trying to come up a plan for myself. Please take a look at my situation and any advice would be greatly appreciated.
I’m an international student from China and got into a decent liberal art college in upstate new york couple years back. I did well there and had good grade for the first year, than family things hit me. My fiancee cheated on me, and I was not mature enough to handle it and failed one class. (Fortunately my overall gpa was still not bad, 3.5+) Family back home was also on fire. Business screwed up and I can’t afford the 70k tuition anymore.
I thought community colleges are cheap and the ones in California had deals with UCs, so I told myself I’ll transfer to a CC in Cali, get myself together, and transfer to one of the UCs. It didn’t work out very well. Family things back home hitted me again. Parents divorced and my mother was hospitalized multiple times, and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I was tired. I spend the next two years taking nonsense classes to maintain my student status and keeping myself from doing anything stupid. GPA nosedived to 2.0.
My grandfather was diagnosed with a terminal disease couple weeks back, and all the sudden I feel like the burden is gone. There is a buddist koan about waking someone up with a blow and a shout, and maybe this is the case for me. I realized at least I’m still alive and healthy, and it’s probably going to stay that way for a while so what about I get myself together and do something with my life.
I’m not a bad student. I had good grade in highschool, and decent grade first year in my college. I took the new SAT recently and scored 1550, which should prove that I still have the potential to success in college. I didn’t completely waste my two year in Cali as well. I was the local outreach leader for one of the presidential candidates during 2016 election(I’m a political science major). I also learned to trade equity derivatives on my own and was actually pretty successful. I think long as the admission overlook my failure at CC a bit, I should remain rather competitive.
Here’s what I’m going to do.
First, I’ll try to get in touch with my old school to see if they can offer any FA for me. I was a student there and the professors there know me, so there should be a better chance of them trusting me.
Second, I’ll start searching for small, private schools that are generous about FAs. I’ll have a lot of explaning to do, and I don’t think people at bigger public schools will listen to me. I’ll also get in touch with their admissions early on, as they might offer some advice for me.
Third, I’ll get the best grade I can get from now on.
My deepest gratitute for anyone who read the whole post. Thanks for your time, and please leave some advice for me if you wouldn’t mind.