My high school record was awful (there were many personal reasons for this, which I will freely admit in my application essay). I barely graduated and didn’t even take the SATs. I grew up in a high-poverty area where this was common and didn’t even realize I could go to college on financial aid until a couple of years ago. I spent the last decade working in manufacturing.
Went back to community college, got a 4.0 GPA in business administration, enrolled in honors classes, Phi Theta Kappa, summer abroad @ a top university (funded by two national scholarships). I would be applying as a second-semester sophomore or first-semester junior (depending on how many credits they accept).
Do I have a shot at the ILR school? Or would my high school record + not working in a traditionally prestigious field sink me?
I can’t think of any reason, from what you posted, that your application would obviously be considered a
non-starter for admission to ILR. Whether you get in or not would likely depend on the totality of your application. But somebody would have to be an admissions officer there to have any valid insight on how that might play out. And I am not one.
I can say that LR certainly admits students out of community colleges. It seems reasonable to me that some subset of those people probably have non-traditional backgrounds and work experience. I personally did not encounter such people when I was there, but I was not in ILR. I did have a suitemate studying art who seemed to have a colorful background and was a CC transfer. But he was roughly our same age.
One thing you might consider is who, academically, is the real grahamcracker123: The HS version, or the CC version? Because getting in is one thing, getting out is something else again. In that same suite there was a guy who transferred into ILR from a four-year college of lesser repute. He had been an indifferent student in high school, but at his college he had a 4.0 or close to it. His goal was to go to law school. He spent his junior year barely passing in ILR with a C+, and at the time I parted company with him he was desperately applying to non-accredited law schools. Of courses that was a great many years ago, before many subsequent waves of grade inflation.
But if you think you are up for the challenge, and really want ILR’s unique curriculum and program of studies, I dont think you would be wasting your application fee to try.
I’ve found that Cornell departments are open to phone calls to ask questions like yours. The people I’ve reached there tend to be warm and friendly. They have articulation agreements with several NY state CCs, such as TCCC and BMCC and LaGuardia Cc in NYC.
With that, it looks like they are open to students with more unusual backgrounds.
Best of luck on your journey.