What do you mean by hardships? I spend several hours a week working on my wood working projects, posting them online, and shipping them/buying new materials. It may be underwhelming on paper, but it is a full fledge business. It is not easy to balance it with school work, and to be honest I don’t know any other students who have started their own business.
I completed over 200 service hour last summer + school year, but I’m not sure exactly what more I can do. It’s probably too late now, but can you give me some examples of things I should have done over my summer? I live near Davidson College and reached out to some bio professors there. Some of them responded, but I wasn’t able to actually do any research, just kind of tag along and view from the sideline, so I did it for a while before discontinuing.
For sports, it may have been confusing but I’ve played club tennis since 7th grade. I was number two on my school team freshman year (and won all conference + team captain), but then changed schools midway through sophomore year so I was unable to play school tennis that year (but still played club). I started a tennis team at my new school and was captain + 1st seed junior year and will be playing again senior year (but since our school is so small we are not in an actual conference). So all in all I have played club tennis for 5 years and school tennis for 3 (and excelled in it).
Yes, I can confirm that I have/will be taking all the most rigorous courses offered at my school. My school doesn’t offer many APs such as AP chem, Calc BC, Physics, etc. that I would have wanted to take, but it is a college prep school. My school only lets students take two APs junior and senior year and one sophomore year (since I switched schools midway through sophomore year I couldn’t take an AP that year). It’s not like I couldn’t handle more APs than 2 last year. Both APs I took had the second and third lowest % of 5s received out of all AP exams, and this year the AP lit exam received the lowest scores ever, so although my scores were only 4s I don’t think they were that bad. Multiple people have told me that AP scores don’t really matter that much when getting into schools, but more so actually taking hard classes.
I am also a student superintendent advisor and only about 10 people are chosen out of the entire Catholic schools system to be one, so I think that is something worth mentioning. My in school ECs are standard and thats because theres not many opportunities at such a small school as mine, and I took all the leadership positions I could.
A girl from my school was just admitted to Brown this year and she had way less ECs than I did and similar scores. She was a minority, however, so I know that factored into admissions though.