Before anything, I’ll give some basic info about my family’s income and how I am doing in school.
My mother is unemployed while my father gets 58K from working at the Post Office, but he works overtime every day so his income doubles to about 100K. With this, my family is quite middle-class and we live in Philadelphia.
I have a 3.97 weighted GPA, 3.75 unweighted and I am waiting on my scores from my SAT. My class rank (if it matters) is #18 in my graduating class. I plan on taking 3 AP classes during my senior year, I only took one in my junior year because that was the only one that was offered since I did not have the balls to take AP Calculus, considering I am bad at math.
So now onto my dilemma: I dream about USC. It’s the dream school for me and if I go there, I plan to major in Communications, specifically Digital Social Media. Not only would I love to go to school in California, but I believe in my heart that I would love and cherish my experiences there more than staying in Philadelphia and going to school here. Only problem is that my parents are under the impression that I will be going to Penn State Abington for two years for my general courses and then to Penn State Main Campus. The main reason for this plan is because of our income, we are in a weird spot where colleges will see that we can spend money on tuition but obviously to my parents, we don’t want to pay that much money.
The more unfortunate part is that USC is need-blind, so I have to work extra hard to get some kind of scholarship from USC, which seems pretty much impossible. But with Penn State, I feel almost a guarantee that I will get in with a scholarship. I have so many thoughts going on inside my head about what to do. Should I be selfish and go to USC or stay in Philadelphia with my family but sacrifice my happiness and be financially stable?
I’ve gotten a couple of responses. Other people in my family have told me to go to USC, because my parents wouldn’t want to hold me back or for me to hold myself back. My therapist told me that going to California will be risky but at least I will have the choice to come home, rather than being stuck where I am at forever and regretting taking the chance. My counselors and teachers have told me that I should try to aim lower because my stats are not that impressive and it’s not worth the debt. And most importantly, my parents believe that I don’t need to go that far to get the job that I want in the future.
I’m unsure about where to go with this and I’m just looking for some advice, because I know that there is no definite answer.
Here is my “possible colleges” list, just in case you guys think that I am a person of extremes (which I kind of am):
USC
UCLA
UC, Berkeley
USCB
USCD
uPenn
Temple University
Penn State Main Campus/Penn State Abington
Community College of Philadelphia
Thank you, I’m excited to hear what you guys have to say about this.