Hey everyone; I do hope I’m posting this in the right place. I apologize if it isn’t.
I’ve got a very bizarre situation on my hands that I’ve had trouble figuring out due to less than helpful academic advisors- I’m attempting to get into college despite having no education since the fourth grade. A little (or long) explanation might help here.
In the fourth grade I began showing signs of being a gifted student, things like picking up chess in less than a day, teaching myself the piano by sound, and I was even reading at a high school freshman level. My parents were extremely unhappy with this, as they were part of a near-cult sect of Christianity that focused heavily on anti-intellectualism. They decided to pull me out of school before the fifth grade and “homeschool” me, despite neither parent being a high school graduate. What followed was eight years of my mother lying to the orchestrator of said school, by way of making me copy answers out of her teacher’s book. Needless to say, I learned nothing. In my freshman year of high school, she tried to send me back into the public system because she was tired of my teenage antics; I failed miserably due to not having necessary prior knowledge and I managed to get the first F- in the history of the school. She pulled me back out and punished me, of course.
At 17, home life was horrifying. My brother was near psychotic- it wasn’t irregular to find a SWAT team organized outside of our trailer park home and I was hardly allowed to leave the house. I began hiding philosophy and art books under my bed to feed my budding interest in the world, but my mother found them and decided to pour spaghetti sauce into all the pages. Weird, I know. I was decent with drawing and applied to the Academy of Art in San Francisco because it didn’t require a GPA or a portfolio. My mother bribed the head of the homeschool agency for a diploma, as both parents were of the opinion that children shouldn’t live with their parents after 18. I left for college and had my first taste of the real world.
My grades were awful as I was unable to even figure out how to learn, how to study. The idea of a deadline was beyond my understanding and so my teachers all failed me. On top of this, I was struggling with psychosis and depression, still unaware that I had Bipolar 1 disorder because my past episodes had been explained to me by my parents as “demonic powers”. Yeah, it was that bad. I lost my apartment, and my will to live, but was saved by the fact that I’m a fairly logical, unfeeling person and it just made more sense to take my medication than jump out a window. I haven’t had an episode since.
For two years after school, I tried to feed my interests but I was losing steam. The two things that stuck with me were an interest in physics (that generally went un-studied as I had NO math knowledge and just figured I was awful at it) and a larger interest in photography. After cutting all ties with my family and moving to Pittsburgh, I logged 360 hours on my 3DS in two months and realized that I needed to do something with my life.
My interest in the photographer Man Ray actually led me to his assistant, Berenice Abbott. Her scientific photography struck a chord with me and I became obsessed with the idea of shooting physics (so rarely done, being so difficult) in both abstract and documentary form. This also led me to find out that even telescopes and microscopes were too limited in this field- newer ideas such as the quantum camera were emerging but my choices were still too few. My ideas had expanded to not just photography, but engineering optics to my personal needs. The difficulty in getting to this point would be huge but I was resolute in my ideas.
This brings us to now. Over the next year, I plan to make up all of the schooling I’ve missed. To start things off, I took a practice SAT to see where I stood; Absolutely nothing on the test made sense to me. The terminology, the equations, and the grammar was so far beyond me. So I made up my own ways to solve the questions as I went along. I worked out everything according to logic and how I thought numbers and words might work. It was after a long day at work, I hadn’t been in school for fourteen years; I was sure I had failed miserably when my timer went off, but lo and behold- I scored 650 in in critical reading, 680 in math, and 600 in writing. I cried for the rest of the night. My goal is to get a 2200 when I take the official test. For now I’ve been studying five hours a day and plan to do so for the next year until I can enter a Community College, where I plan to take computer sciences and learn CAD programs, as well as get Calc 1,2,3 and differential equations out of the way. It’ll take three years, but I’d like to have that knowledge before going to get a BS in physics.
SO TL;DR:
My parents were @$%&heads and now I’m trying to reteach myself high school. I scored a 1930 on my practice SAT with no studying. I want to go to community college for 2 years before applying to Universities. Here are my questions!
Would taking honors count just the same in community college as it would in high school? Are honors courses weighted or does it depend on the school?
My community college offers very few clubs and extracurriculars; do outside organizations count on a college application?
Would it hurt my chances if I take mostly online courses in community college? I have to work full time while studying, so on-campus learning might be hard… but I have no doubts that I can pull a 4.0.
Do universities care about your age? I’ll be 25 after finishing community college.
For physics majors or better yet, those who have graduated from a physics program; do you think it’s important that I learn a few languages and CAD programs before school? It seems like the universities don’t teach you that sort of thing unless you’re in an engineering program. I’m thinking I’d like to learn C++, Fortran, Python, Ruby, Matlab and then Autodesk and maybe OSLO or Zemax eventually.
Will universities have a problem with my high school background or would they go purely off of what I accomplished after?
That said, these are my schools of choice. Maybe slightly unrealistic, but if I don’t try, I won’t know.
Reach:
Columbia University
Caltech
University of Chicago
Possible:
Carnegie Mellon
UCLA
Safety:
University of Pittsburgh
Virginia Tech
Any help is extremely appreciated. I apologize for the epic of my life written here, but it’s so hard to explain what I need without it and my advisors at CCAC have gotten upset at me for the confusion caused by all this. Thanks!