I’m currently a senior in high school at a school I transferred to after my sophomore year. My freshman year I was all in with my grades and not really was a social life and got a 4.1 GPA. (I was attending the same school as a boy who has sexually assaulted me and had strong diagnosed PTSD) My sophomore year I started doing lots of advocacy work for sexual assault and dating violence very publically. There was a lot of backlash from the student body and from my abuser. At the same time, I was beginning to take AP classes and pump up my course load. My PTSD got way, way worse, and I started missing a lot of school (excused absences) to avoid the panic attacks I’d get. As a result, my grades dropped significantly, I don’t know my exact GPA from my sophomore year but I got C’s in my two AP courses, C’s in honors chem, and C’s in Spanish. My AP test scores were a joke (they made me take the test next to the guy who assaulted me knowingly). I transferred schools for junior year, and basically got straight A’s…but my course load wasn’t as heavy because I transferred about a month and a half into the school year and was really worried about playing catchup (still took one AP and the rest was mostly honors). My senior year (now) I am taking three APs and mostly honors besides my electives like journalism (I’m an editor in the paper). I currently have straight A’s, and resume that is packed of advocacy work and public speaking, interning, and starting a nonprofit. At the end of my junior year I had a 3.49 unweighted and 3.88 weighted. Writing is definitely my biggest passion besides advocacy work so I feel my essays are really strong. I’m legacy at Stanford and Brown, and I want to know if there’s a chance that I could get into these schools still. I used my essay to describe my experience of course and the additional information to elaborate on my grades and how they are now on a clear upward trend since leaving the environment I was in. Do I have a shot, a strong shot, no shot? I feel really worried that that one year will ruin my chances. I know I can handle the course load, I work really hard and have good time management skills I just could not be in that situation and it made things impossible.