The road less traveled was filled with potholes...

Applying to College
1

All-

I’m looking for a bit of insight, support, or blatant ego boosting lies.

I’m a non-traditional student who’s gone through a rather unique, but tumultuous journey. I spent 1.5 years at a top level foreign University, and withdrew for mental health reasons. My grades were less than stellar, leaving me with 3 '0’s (which work out like Fs), and a pretty low GPA when converted back to a US scale. It’s hard to make an exact conversion, but it’s definitely below 2.0 when you include the Fs.

I then spent a fair amount of time doing tackling the unresolved mental health issues, and went back to a community college. I’ve now completed a AA degree with a 3.9, and have a broad variety of great extra curriculars.

What’s nagging at me is as I apply to several competitive state schools, when I average out my GPA using the best conversion from the foreign Uni credits, my GPA drops to 3.0-3.2…

Does that first experience take me out of competition for Acceptance for a school that typically admits students with a 3.4-3.5?

Any success stories or horror stories would be appreciated.

2

I don’t think it takes you out of competition. Admissions are very different for transfer students (less competitive, for one thing, and a lot of students have some baggage that caused them to transfer) and you hear stories all the time of people who got in despite their ****ty grades. It looks good that your grades went up. It looks good that you are pursuing other things outside of school. If anything, you can try to slip something about your difficult history into one of the college statements. Also, if you got into top universities after high school, that must mean you were a good student before. They will look at everything - high school transcripts included - and presumably, see that you are an intelligent person who went through a rough patch at one school.