I'm a rising senior at a poor, low performing high school in a rural area of the country. No one from my high school has ever gone to an ivy league school or anything remotely close. The average ACT score is 16 and our school was declared an academic emergency by the state a couple years ago, we only have around 130 kids in my class, but we face many of the problems of a large inner city school (drugs, teen pregnancy, and fights are extremely common), We even have bathroom monitors like we're in elementary school... I'm obviously looking forward to getting out of here, and somehow I've managed to give myself a chance to go to a top school, maybe not Ivy League, but I think I'd have a chance at a top 30 university. This would be higher than anyone at my school has ever gone. The only problem is that I feel incredibly unprepared. I got a 34 on my ACT (I'm just really good at standardized testing especially for a black guy) and I have a 4.0 UW gpa. I feel like I should be confident in my ability to succeed, but when I answer SAT II practice questions online I do horribly and miss most of the questions classified as easy just because I honestly have never been exposed to such things at my high school. I hear numerous stories of graduates from my high school majoring in things like nursing or chemistry and failing miserably, only to switch to something easy or in most cases transfer back to our local community college. Sorry for the novel but I just want to be successful wherever I go and it seems like the odds are stacked against me.
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