学生故事：作为在家学习者申请大学

so I was home-schooled almost all of my education and before college but like a lot of home schoolers I took a lot of classes high school a local high school I took classes at a local college this was mainly in the high school years before before high school I was mostly taught almost everything by my parents but in high school you know there are some classes that my parents are an expert at as great as they are at many things so I took for instance like there was a local high school had a great Latin teacher and I had been taught Latin by my mom but she's not a lot an expert so I had a great time I started loving Latin when I took Latin at this local high school and local college [ __ ] university I did some other online courses so some of them sort of aimed at home schoolers and and one summer I went to UCLA because I was really into filmmaking and I took a filmmaking course there and one of the added benefits that in retrospect I think was really important is that I I got to know a UCLA professor and he ended up actually writing one of my recommendation letters for college and the other recommendation letter was from my English teacher and I think she was my senior must have been junior junior year English teacher at the local high school who I loved and she liked me a lot so that was a great choice because it's always best to have someone maybe less bias than your parents who are writing your recommendation letters I think probably the biggest piece of advice I give to a homeschooler working on their college application is that you need to think about in your application what things can you demonstrate that you've learned so for instance for me I took a bunch of classes at you know college or high school and so I had you know a transcript I had grades sort of to prove that I had learned those things but there are a lot of things that my parents really taught me on their own and I'd sort of figured out on their own and so they didn't really give me a test and I couldn't really verify in some way that really makes sense to a college admissions person so for those things I was those areas I was thinking about how can I demonstrate so in one one way was that I had built this cool science project so I took photos of it and I made sort of a report about that and I actually included that in my college application and that was a way to show that I had learned some science not just that my parents said I had learned some science and any other way was with my essays so one of the things that I had learned a lot from my parents particularly in my home school life curriculum was that I learned a lot about history and literature and I had read a lot of books and I loved reading and you know I listed all the books that I had read but I also wanted to demonstrate that I had a breadth of knowledge about the literature of the world and you know historical works and so my essay would incorporate a lot of them and I talked about how much I loved reading these books and and that was a way you know hopefully to show to an admissions person that that I had really I had learned something and you know because I didn't really have any other concrete way to demonstrate that so as a homeschool student I I wasn't really involved in a lot of the traditional extracurricular activities that will often be arranged as part of a high school I did go part-time to a high school so I had some opportunities to get involved with those things but some of them are only for full-time high school students so you do have to seek them out sometimes and you have to sometimes there are homeschool groups really depends on the area sometimes there are even home school sports teams in my case there wasn't a home school sports team but one of the things that I did is just I was really into making movies I loved filmmaking and I liked video stuff and I just so-so I with my friends I would get together and I make movies and they would be really silly and cheesy and fun but that was a thing where I was bringing a lot of people together so that was sort of building community I was working with people and and having a lot of fun but also making something that was cool and I could sort of demonstrate and I actually on some of my applications I believe not all of them accepted that but I submitted a DVD of movies that I had made for some applications and sort of secondary things allowed to submit and like an artistic supplement so I showed those movies but I also talked about them and talked about working with a team and being the director and someone's letting someone else be a director and working with them and in that whole process and I think that was an important piece in my application because the war as a homeschool there weren't as many of the sort of group activity extracurriculars as as that may be your average high school student would have