I’m 15 years old, and I’m worried that it may already be too late for me to get into a good college.
If you want to go to a “good” college you need to volunteer, get a good SAT score, and get a high GPA. At my school, that means taking honors classes. But when you’re like me and haven’t been taking advanced courses since kindergarten, that’s not so easy.
Like many of my classmates, I applied for AP classes junior year. On the day we found out if we got in, I knew what to expect. A big packet for yes, a slip of paper for no. I was sitting next to my friend when we got our answers. He was handed a stapled packet and I looked down at my single piece of paper. I hadn’t made the cut.
High SAT scores and a good GPA used to be most of what colleges cared about, but the stakes keep getting raised, which isn’t good for kids like me.
I want to believe that school is still for educating, not weeding teens into success and failures. Because high school students should have room to make mistakes.