I’m not afraid to admit it: in my freshman and sophomore year, I didn’t do as well as I am doing now.
But come junior year – when I saw myself lower than I wanted to be on the Naviance graphs – I decided to really focus and try harder.
Of course, I was naïve. I didn’t know how important it was to do well, or how much my freshman and sophomore grades affected my GPA. I didn’t realize that, in the scheme of things, I was squashing collegiate opportunities. I also didn’t realize that no matter how well I did junior and senior year, clawing my way back to the top was an impossible task.
Here are the cold, hard facts: many, many colleges employ cookie cutter techniques in order to purge applicants. And sometimes, that’s what they have to do—they need some way to separate the thousands of papers they receive. These methods include sifting through the GPAs, SAT and ACT scores, leadership notations and/or community service notations. The problem is, as a freshman and a sophomore, the determination to socially acclimate and adapt to the high school lifestyle eclipses the determination to soar academically. This sort of academic success, at the end of the day, is half of your high school career. Whether you like it or not, it has a tremendous impact on the numbers that show up on your transcript.
Now, I’m not a genius, that’s for sure. I acknowledge my mistakes.
But I didn’t know any better.
I had gone through freshman year without thinking about college. And why should I? It was four years away. My underdeveloped freshman mind, as one could expect, was a bit oblivious to the importance of early academic success. I wasn’t as focused on GPA. Counselors showed me some personality tests and future job predictions, but I didn’t know where any colleges were, what they offered, and how selective their admissions department was.
But I’m not blaming Staples.
Staples High School begins the full-court college press when students are juniors. I am sure the administration has flirted with teaching freshmen and sophomores the importance of their grades, but they don’t. And they shouldn’t start.
Because the real problem lies with the colleges emphasis on overall GPA.
Although I won’t name the schools, some colleges wrote me off because my freshman and sophomore grades negatively impacted my overall GPA. Here’s something upsetting: my junior year GPA was above their average GPAs, but my 3-year GPA was below. In essence, the Charlie Greenwald of the past didn’t meet their expectations, but the Charlie Greenwald of the present did. My bad first 2 years outweighed my redeeming, most recent 3rd year. So I got rejected.
Is that fair?
I don’t know what other people think—if they agree that college methods aren’t fair, or if they disagree and think that freshman and sophomore years are just as important and that the kids should know better. All I know is that colleges don’t give some kids a chance because they screwed up their first two years.
So why did I even bother trying to turn it around?
Because some colleges, including ones that accepted me, looked past it and recognized my resurrection and my potential. They took a minute to look at the arc, not the numbers.
If only they all could.
