<p>I was wondering if there were any homeschoolers on here and what colleges y'all are thinking of going to? I was curious what kind of schools home schoolers are interested in. :)</p>
<p>My son, who was homeschooled from birth, but attends high school part-time, has applied to a long list of schools, mainly because he intends to major in music, and it can be hard to get into music schools. His list includes: Oberlin, Lawrence (accepted), Stanford, Northwestern, Indiana University (accepted), University of North Texas (accepted), New England Conservatory (a long shot), University of Denver (accepted), and University of Northern Colorado (accepted by college, hasn't heard from music school yet). The ones he hasn't yet heard from should be sending out letters within the next two weeks.</p>
<p>My older son will be graduating from Stanford this coming June.</p>
<p>I applied and got into NYU early decision. I never decided which other schools I was going to apply to if I didn't get into NYU.</p>
<p>I've gotten into Allegheny, and am waiting on Wesleyan, Williams, Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Swarthmore, Vassar, Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, and Sarah Lawrence (my current favorite)</p>
<p>I applied to Northwestern early decision and got in.</p>
<p>Whew, Zahra! And I thought MY son applied a lot of places. You must have spent hours and hours doing all those applications. May your mailbox be filled with fat envelopes this week and next! Hope you get some great offers to choose from.</p>
<p>My son, homeschooled for 12 years, applied to MIT (accepted), Caltech (accepted), Stanford (waiting for letter), and Harvard (waiting for letter). Recent seniors from our local support group have ended up at MIT, Stanford, Pomona, Earlham, Reed, and some local schools.</p>
<p>I'm planning to apply to:</p>
<p>Columbia
Harvard
Pomona
Saint Mary's (CA)
Stanford
UC Berkeley
UCSD
U. of Rochester
Yale</p>
<p>My S applied to ...</p>
<p>and is waiting on
Harvard
Princeton
Columbia
Brown
Amherst</p>
<p>Accepted to...</p>
<p>Williams-early write:)
Lafayette-Marquis Scholar</p>
<p>He spend K through 7th in public school.
8th and 9th private.
HS at home.
Worked out OK as he had more time to do his illustrations, which might have proved to be his hook.</p>
<p>texas137.....</p>
<p>:DCongratulations!!!!:D</p>
<p>Hopefully more to come.</p>
<p>I applied ED to Scripps and was accepted. My other top choices were Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Grinnell, and Mount Holyoke.</p>
<p>And wow, congrats to nopoisonivy and texas!</p>
<p>I've been homeschooled since midway through 7th grade.</p>
<p>I applied to...</p>
<p>Notre Dame
Northwestern
Duke
Purdue (accepted)
Wake Forest
Dartmouth
Princeton
Harvard
Brown</p>
<p>I'm interested in applying ED to Brown, I have called up their admissions office as well as a few others, but all the answers I received to the portfolio question were pretty nebulous.</p>
<p>How should I present things? Would a three-ring binder be acceptable for most colleges, or do they require homeschoolers to be boxed into the same forms as traditional applicants? Are both acceptable?</p>
<p>Also, I attended Freshman year at a traditional high school. I received good grades (straight As except one B+), but was not very active in school, at all. I no longer have contact with that school at all. For the past few years, I have been taking college classes full time (4.0 GPA) and have had a very full life with a lot of community work and such. Will I still be required to send my Freshman transcript, and will my lack of Freshman year activities be held against me? </p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p>a portfolio is most appropriate for a homeschooler who has not taken any/many courses, and needs to actually show in detail exactly what they did, with things like book lists and work-samples. That does not sound like your situation. Homeschoolers who take a lot of standardized tests (esp AP) and college or distance learning courses will have something that looks like a regular school transcript listing all of that stuff with the grades or test scores recieved. You might include a separate document with brief course descriptions (few lines per course), But if you have a grade in a standard course, or a score on a standardized test, they aren't really going to need (or want) to look at 20 pages of work samples and a detailed syllabus with exactly what you did every week.</p>
<p>Yes, you will need to send a transcript of your freshman year, unless you are applying to colleges that don't look at freshman year for some reason. But I doubt if your lack of ECs freshman year will matter. If the overall picture is that you have been active in community activities over an extended period of time, it won't matter that it did not start freshman year.</p>
<p>When I applied to my (15) colleges, I submitted both their standard forms and a 30 page portfolio, which included: </p>
<p>1) A 5-page document in lieu of the Common Application School Report. Because I was an autonomous home-schooler - my parents were not involved in my education - I had to delve in significantly more detail than some other home-schooled applicants. Thus, I had to clearly delineate my reasons for home-schooling, the nature of my autonomy. Everyone, though, should probably include the structure and function of their academic program.
2) 4 page transcript. I appended to my coursework conventional grades; I wish I hadn't. One can rarely draw comparison between the work of a home-schooler and that of another high schooler; it would have served me better to have narrative evaluations.
3) 21 page document - course name, along with complete list of texts, and a brief description.</p>
<p>For home-schooled students, substantiation seems to be imperative; So - If I could do again, I wouldn't just take 8 AP exams, I would take 11 or 12. I wouldn't take 3 SAT II's, I would take 5 or 6. One thing I did right, however, was take 1 to 7 courses at a high school, a community college, and a state university each year. Colleges required me to send the HS transcript, even though I hadn't taken classes there since freshman year. I think it can only help you, though (of course) the college courses will be more impressive. I assume, fids, that if you apply to Brown or top LACs, you'll have to do the same.
Hope this helps!</p>
<p>Oh gosh, I thought that I made my own thread about this. I didn't realize that I did this! Sorry everyone.</p>
<p>What if I have about 50 accumulative college credits, but the vast majority of my studying and learning and activities have still been directed by myself and pursued on my own? Wouldn't a portfolio make sense?</p>
<p>fids - you have 2 years of full-time college attendance, and 1 year of full time high school attendance. You will be required to submit official transcripts from those institutions. From the viewpoint of the colleges you apply to, you are not a homeschooler at all. You will have just as many courses and grades as all of their other traditionally schooled applicants, and they will not be looking for a portfolio full of work samples and reading lists to explain any of those courses.</p>
<p>If you feel that a significant amount of your learning and activities come from outside your coursework, you will be exactly like any other traditionally schooled applicant who is heavily involved in activities outside their coursework. Whether or not colleges will accept supplemental material is going to vary. Some say "no extra stuff". Some will look at whatever anyone sends them. But the general policy for everyone is going to apply to you, too.</p>
<p>I'm sorry, maybe I am not being completely clear. I will not get a diploma or a GED. I don't have any "required" curriculum and over half of my learning has been approached at home; the college work has always felt "supplemental" to me. I spend about 12 hours a week volunteering and teaching classes at a homeschooling center which I was a member of for two weeks, I also served on the board of directors, there. I definitely consider myself a homeschooler and naturally assumed that colleges would as well.</p>
<p>It won't let me edit, but I meant that I have been a member of this homeschooling center for two years, I have no idea why I said weeks.</p>
<p>I'm hearing all this conflicting information, though. :-/</p>
<p>fids - GED or diploma has nothing to do with it. Many traditionally high schools students go to college after junior year, w/o a diploma. And whether or not you consider yourself a homeschooler doesn't really have much to do with it either. The issue is providing admissions offices with enough information to place you in the context of their other applicants, but not so much that they won't look at it. Three years of full time coursework on a transcript is a LOT. That plus your essays, application, and rec letters will give them as much information about you as they have about anyone else. That means that they don't "need" a lot of supplemental material in order to form an opinion. Whether or not they are willing to look at it is probably going to depend on how they handle supplemental material generally.</p>
<p>My son's situation was not that different from yours. He had a bunch of grades from college courses, and a bunch of AP scores we used like grades, and a bunch of stuff that he did on his own. We made a 2-page master transcript that listed everything he did each year, with the stuff he did on his own lumped under some kind of arbitrary course title. All of the outside grades and AP scores were included, but no parent-generated grades. There was a separate 5-page "course descriptions" document. For courses where he had a grade or AP score, there wasn't much of a description. For things he did on his own, or in an ungraded homeschooler class, there was more. It included books read, materials used, hours spent in group discussion, informal lectures, courses on videotape. There was no "portfolio" in the sense of providing extensive primary materials and work samples for someone else to evaluate, because there was plenty of evaluated coursework already there in the form of college grades and AP scores (also awards in academic competitions). Son got in everywhere he applied, with no suggestion from anyone that they did not have enough information or that they wanted more "stuff".</p>
<p>If a student has few grades/scores/awards, I think admissions offices would need more material to evaluate, and a portfolio with things like work samples would be warrented. But if a student has lots of grades/scores/awards, the need to look at a lot of supplemental material is less (from the ad coms point of view, not the student's). </p>
<p>You definitely need to describe the coursework you have done on your own, and the work you have done with your homeschooling support group, but you may be able to do that within the confines of a transcript + course descriptions + essays + rec letters. If that's the case, supplemental material becomes "extra" material, and you might want to follow the school's general policy on it.</p>