<p>Second - I'm freaking out about grades because I've been on a downward trend - don't worry, I've studied today, taking AP English Exam tomorrow, I'm about to go study more. I've had lots of mental and emotional trouble but I think I'm going to figure everything out. Not in time to fix my grades. Right now I have a 3.5, I'll probably end this school year with a 3.4.... maybe keep my 3.5 if a couple of my teachers will have pity on me. I had mostly A- and B+ grades until junior year when I started getting C grades in core classes. (all except for English where I got a solid A.) I wanted a 4.0 for second semester, but it is too late for that. I've been struggling to raise grades from Ds and Cs. I hope to have Bs or at least C+ grades in the three classes where I struggle. I'm worried about my terrible grades and downward trend for university admissions. I'm not unintelligent, I've just had a really hard year on a personal level. I have above average test scores and have been studying to take the SAT again. My goal is 2100, and that shouldn't be an issue because I just need to gain about 100 points. I don't want to apply to lots of schools that will reject me academically. The way things are, I feel like every single school would have a reason to reject me. I had a chance this semester to improve and I didn't. I didn't really have the emotional support I needed until very recently, but I feel like no school should buy that because everyone has problems and they do better than I have. I don't want to apply to schools that would without a doubt, reject me academically. That's why Northwestern came off of the list. That's why I very well might take Michigan off of the list. I'm still not sure about schools like Boston University, UT, USC, McGill, Southern Methodist, Lawrence, Oberlin, Temple, Arizona State, two state schools excluding my flagship.... conservatories (I have most of the major ones on my list - how much do they care about my grades and scores?) I really feel that I can pull of all A grades or very close to it first semester next year like I used to, but I know that's going to be too late for many schools. In honesty, is this going to be a huge problem with music performance? Most schools I've talked to say that music can appeal admissions for students they really want, but I fear that as a soprano that may not happen for me in too many cases, no matter how well I might be able to perform. Which schools will this be a really big issue for? Any experiences with kids that have low grades? Inspiration? I think I'd personally prefer a conservatory, but I feel that a well rounded education is important. I also wonder about undergraduate success in outside feels if necessary after conservatory education. Woah, sorry for all the questions. But thanks!</p>
<p>I don’t have any personal experience with vocals, or even a performance major. I can tell you though, your academics are not that bad. If you have some good years under your belt with A’s, on top of good test scores. Then you shouldn’t be that off. Also, unless application fees are an issue, I highly suggest applying to schools even if you think they’re going to reject you automatically. The only thing you’d lose is your application fee, but think of all of the things you’ve gained. If there’s too many schools then just narrow it down and apply to schools that you REALLY want to get in, even if you think they’ll reject you. You never know, plus you’re a performance major so you’ll need to audition. If you kill the audition, then that will speak for itself and not your grades. Which, may I remind you, are not bad. </p>
<p>I had a tough year my senior year. Personal issues. I was 9th in my class at the end of Junior year, strait A’s. Then I almost failed every single class, I didn’t even attend most of my senior year. I think I barely passed with D’s. Point is, colleges still accepted me. I had other grades to speak for it. Even my test grades were horrible. (I had to take SATs the day after my mom passed away.) The point of it is, you never know until you try. And if getting into a top notch school is important to you. I suggest taking a few music related courses at a community college and ace them. Colleges will look at that and not the few times you slipped in high school.</p>
<p>Don’t let the inflated numbers in the Chance Me threads here on CC get you down. A 3.4 GPA and a 2000 SAT will be more than adequate at just about any conservatory and at many universities with top music departments so long as your audition meets their standards.</p>
<p>At the stand-alone conservatories, the audition counts for pretty much everything so long as you can communicate effectively with your teacher and the others in your ensembles. At many other schools where the music department is integrated with the university, the audition is still by far the most important component, but you may still need to meet a respectable academic threshold so as not to be disqualified. A 3.4/2000 is more than respectable at many of the schools you name.</p>
<p>At a very few, your academic stats will put you at a disadvantage or may remove you from consideration entirely. It is better to focus on the large majority of schools where you still have a decent shot than on the handful where you do not.</p>
<p>I would suggest doing a bit of research to determine if your GPA and test scores at least fall within the 25th to 75th percentile of the schools that interest you. (Only for the Colleges and Universities; this is not necessary for the stand-alone conservatories.) I think you will find many at which you are just a bit below the median GPA and, even without retaking it, that you are already above the median SAT score at many of them.</p>
<p>You may want to think about what AP classes you really want to take next year. If the homework becomes so time consuming that it prevents you from putting together the best audition you can, then you may want to think about taking a somewhat less demanding academic load and putting in more practice time. This is not quite as much of an issue for a singer, who probably should not be doing more than a couple of hours a day of practice anyway, as it would be for a string player or pianist who could be putting in four or more hours per day.</p>
<p>My daughter got into Oberlin Conservatory with a GPA only slightly higher than yours and SAT scores not quite as good as what you already have. The only AP that she took was in Music Theory. She did not even bother with the test for that, since music schools do not as a rule grant credit for AP Music Theory. She was not accepted by BU, but that was not because of her GPA or test scores, rather that she was competing for admission into one of the top double bass studios in the country and her audition there was not the best. She was also accepted at Peabody and NEC, where the academics were not even considered.</p>
<p>I also know a young woman who was accepted at all her schools with your stats. Conservatories and universities (NYU and USC among them). She was very well prepared for her auditions.</p>
<p>Obviously the decline in your grades is going to be troubling to some schools, but you also on the application process have the ability to try and explain them. Actually, might be a pretty good essay topic, about a struggle you have had to face and how you worked to overcome it…</p>
<p>In any event, I tend to agree with Bassparent, don’t be so quick to narrow down your options in terms of schools. Grades obviously mean something but especially with music students they may not be the be all end all some will claim, even on here. Your GPA is not terrible and if you show an effort to turn your grades around that might work in your favor (most schools, least they did in my day, may require you to submit first semester grades from senior year). With music admissions is you do well on the auditions that can give a certain amount of leeway on the academic admit from what I have seen and heard, as compared to an academic only admit to the same programs. Yes, it would be better going in with the good SAT score and the higher gpa (possibly get academic merit scholarships if that was the case), but keep in mind there are kids going into music with those kind of stats who get admitted academically and fail the audition (point being that grades in terms of music admission don’t mean as much as they do academically). </p>
<p>Quite honestly, given the competitiveness of vocal music, the more important question might be how talented you are musically, that admission to highly competitive programs in music is often a lot more stiff then the academic competition to get into the same school (a soprano in voice, for example, is uber competitive, because there are usually a lot of people applying from what I know) and that might be more limiting then grades.</p>
<p>If you feel the musical side is there, then concentrate on trying to get your grades up as much as possible, apply to the schools you wish (have some that are reaches, some that are more safe), and when applying explain in an essay what happened and how you have fought back, I think it is worth the shot. With stand alone music schools grades generally don’t mean all that much unless you are a total screw up, a 4.0 unweighted GPA with a 2300 SAT at Juilliard isn’t going to gain you favor in admissions, same thing at other stand alone music schools IME, everything there as Bassdad said is on the audition (I was at an info day for Juilliard once, and this helicopter parent, who I heard bragging to other parents about her 2300 SAT, 4.0 unweighted GPA, 8 AP class child, was almost apoplectic when the admissions person in answering a question said that all of that meant very little, that having that wouldn’t get you admission to the school, that it was all the audition, and the mom was like " but he could get into Harvard with that"…:).</p>
<p>Oberlin Conservatory cares about your grades but not to the same degree as Oberlin College. So if you apply only to the Conservatory, you could be fine grade wise, but as Musicprnt and BassDad said, it becomes all about the audition.</p>
<p>I have to echo Bassdad’s post. First of all, I sometimes get annoyed when I read ‘chance me’ posts on CC because it doesn’t paint the whole picture of that individual. Stats are simply just stats. A GPA in one school is not equal to a GPA in another. My S attends a private school that has a brutal grading scale. An A is 95-100%, A- 94-92%, B+ 91-89%,etc. In addition, the courses are very challenging. A 3.5 in his school may be equivalent to a 4.0 in another so it isn’t worth getting all caught up in stats. I would like to think that academic institutions use a more holistic approach when evaluating candidates for admission and I most certainly believe they did that in my son’s case. His GPA is respectable but nothing earth shattering and he was admitted to all 4 schools in which he applied. He prepared well for his auditions and came out of them feeling confident. In addition, he has accomplished a lot outside of school, playing in a band doing gigs on a regular basis, opening up for national acts, recording CDs, and his band won a big HS Rock Off. He also participated in lots of theater productions at his school. Bottom line, being admitted to a competitive music program is not all about great stats, it is more about the applicant’s audition, accomplishments, and proof that he/she is a capable student.</p>
<p>lalalovely2013,
It sounds like you have had a difficult year. As a parent of children who have had emotional and mental health issues. Your post could of been written by a child of mine. Teens have bumps. And many colleges do get that and look at the whole candidate. But not all do. The quantity of applications that show up at some colleges is so great that the processing of them can become somewhat robotic. I joked with the mom of one of my son’s friends who got rejected by his first choice school that his application just happened to land face down. College admissions can be somewhat random. One question we learned to ask when our middle son applied to colleges was whether a college guaranteed that all applications were read by a reader. But even with that as a criteria for admissions, one has to be careful because having a complex application be read by a reader at 11:00pm on a Friday night is very different from having it be read by a reader at 9:00am on a Monday morning. A private college counselor, depending on their experience may be able to help you figure out what colleges do more holistic reviews. </p>
<p>2 of my 3 children applied to conservatory programs. And one advantage of the conservatory application process is that the audition personalizes everything and makes you into a real person and not just a statistic. This allows colleges to move beyond the numbers and if you can show through your audition that you are somebody who is dedicated and grounded that will count for a lot.</p>
<p>Depending on the nature of your mental/emotional troubles you also might want to think about disclosure. In my middle son’s case we decided that full disclosure was important, as we wanted colleges to know what he had overcome to get to where he was. And also we had to explain why he had almost no high school grades on his transcript for his Sophomore Year and why the the few grades he did have were poor. My son also does not test well and did badly given his intelligence and his abilities on the SAT. So his SAT scores were at the bottom of the range of most of the colleges he applied to. Our son’s doctor wrote a letter that our son included in his application. Our son also wrote about his struggles in a supplemental essay. My son was rejected by his top choice school, but that school told our college counselor they rejected our son because he had few extra-curricular or community service activities. On the other hand my son was accepted everywhere else and three of the schools he applied to gave him scholarship money. So here was a kid with a GPA that could not really be calculated because of his struggles in HS, and who had poor SAT scores but who showed he was capable of doing college work by doing a gap year program and taking college courses at our local extension school and community college. </p>
<p>Finally it sounds like you are still dealing with quite a bit of anxiety. Please remember that life is not a race and there is no need to rush off to college if you are not feeling emotionally stable. It is better to take a gap year and work intensely on your mental health then it is to start school and have to go on medical leave. Think about balance. Stressing yourself out your senior year to get top grades in super competitive AP classes is not going to help you in the long run. Try to pick and choose how you want to spend your time next year, while being realistic about how long it takes you to do things. Make your mental health the number one priority!!! Your adult-self many years later will thank you for this, I promise you. Going to a top college is not always the key to a successful adult life. The most successful adults I know are the ones who know how to manage the emotional struggles that come with being an adult and who feel confident taking risks. I have seen adults who were star students in HS and then star students in ivy league colleges go off and lead miserable adult lives. And I have seen mediocre students who then went to mid-level colleges go on to have very successful careers and happy rewarding lives. </p>
<p>Because of our experiences with our older two children we coached our youngest child to ignore the pressure that exists in our community to pad one’s transcript and resume with difficult HS courses and lots of random extra curricular. He is a slow processing dyslexic who due to genetics is at high risk for mental health issues. We told him to ignore recommendations by teachers to take AP math and other overly rigorous courses at our competitive public HS and instead he took a solid college prep curriculum that he found relatively easy. That freed him up with extra time to practice his instrument and focus on his music, which he loved. We did not waste any time on SAT prep so he got OK SAT scores but not great scores. He did however meet regularly with a cognitive psychologist that worked with him on issues around anxiety and how to cope with his processing and memory issues. The result was he was admitted everywhere he applied and more importantly his mental health is good and he did the whole thing with minimal stress. In fact his peers noticed and many said they were jealous of him for the way he did HS and the college admissions process. </p>
<p>Finally you mention Boston University. One program BU has which not everyone knows about is a program called the College of General Studies. It is a program for smart capable kids who may of had some bumps in HS. It is an amazing program and I am told that CGS students end up doing extremely well. You can read about it on their web site.</p>
<p>My D got into her academic reaches as a soprano. She had great grades but performs poorly on standardized tests so her SAT scores were not in the range that might normally be accepted. The voice departments definitely had some sway in her acceptances. BTW, she graduated this year, magna cum laude, so she proved the scores wrong.</p>
<p>not to hijack the thread…</p>
<p>But, congratulations Cartera45!!</p>
<p>Thank you! Didn’t mean to brag but I think there are lots of kids whose test scores and/or grades don’t reflect the kind of student they are. Because of their talent, they can go to schools that they may not have been admitted to otherwise. </p>
<p>I think the OP will do fine with her admissions.</p>
<p>My D went through the same. Had a 3.5 average, did horrifically on her SATs. Got into a school that (at that time) boasted the highest GPA average in music admissions. The funny part…she got an academic scholarship AND, due to her stats, they put her on a sort of “academic probation” at the same time. It did not make a lot of sense. Like your D she graduated Magna in her undergrad and Summa in grad. Things work out when you do what you love.</p>
<p>Lalalovely - Your grades and test scores are competitive for many good music programs. There might be a couple you will have to take off your list, but there should be a lot of great options for you.</p>
<p>One bit of advice - the college application process (especially for music) is stressful and the end of junior year is also stressful. Give yourself a bit of a break. It will not hurt you to take a few weeks off from thinking about college right now, but it could hurt you if you take your focus off school. Finish your papers, projects and finals and then devote yourself to the application process. </p>
<p>I agree with the posters above that you will do fine if you are doing what you love. I have seen that first hand with my own children. </p>
<p>All the best.</p>
<p>musicamusica - congratulations to your D too!</p>