Might as well post here since I'm really in need of some advice.
I'm a Sophomore from Houston, Texas, and I go to a high ranking public high school (in the top 25 from news week's ranking thing afaik). I currently have a 4.4 weighted and 3.7 unweighted GPA, which will fall to a 4.2 weighted and god knows what unweighted at the end of this semester (tomorrow).
I've gone as far as quitting Smogon, don't have any sort of social media to waste time on, have control freak parents, etc etc. I just don't understand what I'm doing wrong :/ Anyway, as far as standardized tests go, I scored a 220 on the October PSAT, which is slightly past the Texas cutoff. I score around 2100s on the SAT. I'm planning on taking the old one over the knew one because the old one has more material to study from. My grades are pretty much irrecoverable at this point and my rank is in the solid 30s-40s out of a class of about 200 people.
I honestly think my mom is my main problem. She always yells at me for bad grades, and, well, pretty much anything. I think without her bugging me so much, I could do better, but that won't be happening ever @_@. It's not that my grades are particularly bad; I got pretty much all As this semester, but the finals just tanked my averages into the high Bs (and none of my teachers will bump me up, even if it is by 1 fucking point).
My course load is the hardest available at my school. I'm currently taking:
- AP Statistics
- PreAP Spanish III
- AP World History
- PreAP Pre-Calculus
- PreAP English II
- PreAP Chemistry
- AP Computer Science
Along with mandatory classes in "SAT Prep" and "Health Science" (my school is for health professions), though they are both 4.0 classes unlike the rest of my schedule.
Extremely weak extracurricular wise. This is what I have:
- Playing the Tabla (Indian drums I guess for ~3 years)
- Karate Black Belt (~10 years)
Yeah, I know, not a lot. Hopefully, my club proposal for Quizbowl will go through and then I'll be captain/president. I'm also doing Science Fair (ISEF, Siemens, STS) when the time comes to give me a sort of edge over other people in my class.
My dream college is probably Rice University, which is really close to my house and has a great Computer Science program, and University of Texas at Austin for similar reasons.
If all else fails, I'll still have Smogon University, right?
tl;dr: shit everything, help ;-;
e: forgot to mention, but I'm currently in an internship (I guess) for a postdoc from University of Houston, so there's that. Working with him for science fair and whatnot.