Cherry Creek High
Six seniors at Cherry Creek High, a public school in Denver, blog about their college searches.
Beginning today, The Choice takes flight from its perch here in New York City, arguably the epicenter of the college-admissions-pressure-cooker in the Northeast, and travels across the country to Denver for a much-needed change of scenery.
There, I have asked six seniors at Cherry Creek High, an idyllic-sounding public school in the small suburb of Greenwood Village, to write an occasional series of first-person essays for this blog about their college application process.
The series makes it debut today — with dispatches from Sophia Gimenez, who is applying to a constellation of women’s colleges and seeking substantial financial aid, and Jessica Ray, who dreams of a career as an engineer. Their writings, and those of their classmates, will continue to be featured on The Choice on a regular basis through spring.
Over the next few days, you’ll also meet Kori Hazel, a son of divorced parents who likens the college search to nothing less than a prison sentence; Avery DiUbaldo, who is applying to theater programs and has already submitted all of his applications ahead of the Jan. 1 deadline; Michael Campbell, who says he must have missed “the take-it-easy-senior-year-thing” and who describes himself as afraid of rejection; and Uyanga Tamir, a native of Mongolia who is desperately in need of scholarship assistance, but who knows that few schools are “need-blind” in their assessment of international students.
“If I cannot afford the tuition,” she writes in her first post, “I simply cannot go.”
Collectively, these six young people represent a broad range of the admissions process nationally, not just in their socio-economic backgrounds, but also in the institutions to which they aspire to attend.
Some are applying to state schools, including the University of Colorado at Boulder and Colorado State; others to the Colorado School of Mines; still others to smaller colleges like Knox, Mills and Scripps. Several also aspire to Yale, M.I.T., Stanford, U.S.C. and the University of Pennsylvania, among other highly selective colleges.
A majority of those from Cherry Creek whose writing we will showcase are seeking financial aid — an element of their applications to which many readers of The Choice should relate.
Over all, the counselors at Cherry Creek estimate that nearly two-thirds of the school’s more than 800 seniors will seek financial assistance. (Meanwhile, those same counselors estimate that nearly 90 percent of the graduating class will go on to four-year college.)
We hope you will enjoy visiting the living rooms, kitchen tables and guidance conferences of these applicants, at least virtually, as they travel a road whose final destination is far from certain. We thank them, in advance, for being willing to tell their stories.
If you’re a parent or an applicant, and would like to use this opening post an opportunity to take stock of where you are in your own college admissions process, please use the comment box below.
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