A couple weeks ago I posted about how homeschooling is the ultimate college hack. Today, I’m going to take that idea a little farther and talk about my experience getting into Pomona College as a Cicero graduate.
One of the biggest foundational flaws in the standard education system is the fact that it’s standard. Traditional school is designed for some ideal, average student. However, no student is average, and learning is not a one-size-fits-all experience. This is one of the reasons why my parents packed me and my sisters onto a sailboat and homeschooled us (we called it boatschooling) for eight years (through middle school and high school.) As a family we felt that homeschooling would be a way for us and our parents to take control of our futures.
“Why Aren’t You Weird”
Last year, in my first year at college, I had to introduce myself a lot. There’s always a moment after I say that I’m homeschooled where I can see my interlocutor wondering to themselves: “But, wait, why aren’t you weird?”
My family began our circumnavigation when I was in fourth grade. We spent the first two years—4th and 5th grade for me—sailing from the Caribbean to Australia, learning how to homeschool along the way. I won’t lie: it was a struggle, especially for my parents. At first they thought they’d wing it: The voyage would be our classroom. Then, when my sisters and I looked bored, they realized that they needed more structure. So, they bought some basic curricula that were mostly worksheets and other low-quality stuff. It led to long afternoons toiling over word problems, and eventually giving up. We all made mistakes in these early days.
After 5th grade we took a break from the boat for three years and returned to our former land life in Philadelphia. Entering 6th grade was rough. Everything around me was both foreign and familiar, and I was embarrassingly and obviously behind in math, which became a tortuous string of unanswered questions and embarrassed coverups. Eventually, my mom contacted a woman who had taught my sister in school, and through that had become friends of the family. She tutored me a couple times a week, using her teaching experience and the one-on-one time to instruct me and calm my nerves around math. This was great. I loved the one-on-one attention and built a strong rapport with her. My grades began to go up. Sitting at my tutors kitchen table with her, I felt myself begin to understand. School was fun and interesting again.
In seventh grade, even though we were still on land, I chose to leave school and homeschool while living in Philly. Sixth grade had taken a toll both academically and in my confidence. I continued taking math with Janet, my teacher. We signed up for an Art of Problem Solving course, and asked Janet to instruct me through it. I jumped way ahead in math, learning at a faster pace than I could’ve in school. And, I loved it!
In eighth grade I re-enrolled in that same middle school, choosing to rejoin the social and academic communities I had opted out of. But, after just a year of working one-to-one with a private teacher I found myself at the head of my math class, even helping friends who didn’t understand. Not only was it reflected in my grades, I felt smarter as well.
This was the beginning of my love affair with homeschooling.
It Turns Out I’m the Guinea Pig
Moving back onto a boat directly before my freshman year of high school was an exciting but daunting time. I was new to homeschooling at the high school level, and we had all decided not to follow the same track as the first two years. With very little wifi, living in remote places, and being relatively new to the homeschooling scene, it took us time to figure out what worked for us.
I took an array of different classes, for instance Derek Owens provided in-depth math and science courses which were less interactive than others but allowed us asynchronicity which worked best with our sporadic internet. In every homeschooling platform or course we found online, there were always trade offs. Like signing up for AP Chemistry in junior year for the purpose of having a teacher instead of my school work being completely self driven. Unfortunately, I didn’t account for the time difference which meant class time was 11:00 PM-12:00 AM. Or, how impossible it is to translate classroom learning onto a screen and have it be exactly the same. That class was a series of late nights, late assignments, unanswered questions, and frustratingly bad grades. I dropped it after a couple of weeks and switched to normal chemistry.
Throughout these four years my favorite class consistently was my English class. Taking a cue from my experience with Janet and one-to-one learning back in Philadelphia, my parents hired Hadley, an experienced English language arts teacher, to lead me through 9th grade English. Again, this was an amazing experience. Hadley would work with my parents and me individually in order to curate a curriculum at the beginning of each year. This allowed us to tailor our class experiences to my own interests while still meeting general requirements. This class design also allowed for asynchronicity because the class was designed for me individually, so when we had a particularly large ocean to cross I would get assignments in advance from Hadley, or take breaks and catch up at a later time. The flexibility made almost anything possible, and I was still able to form those important, one-on-one, relationships with my teacher.
Spoiler: I Got Into College
Fast forward about 15,000 nautical miles of ocean and four years of boatschooling later, I eventually finished up my senior year with a full load of classes that were one-to-one with teachers like Kyle Kirby, Hadley Westman, and Jenny Bourassa,
I applied to Pomona College in the fall of 2022. I was scared of the future, had no idea what I wanted, and was all around confused and frustrated with the process, but I’m pretty sure that’s how everyone feels. I decided pretty quickly that Pomona was it for me—my dream school. But there was one caveat, I was a terrible test taker, and unfortunately for me, as a homeschooler, the ACT/SAT was expected. So I put my head down and worked, really, really hard. I signed up for numerous test prep courses, watched videos, read books, and took practice tests. I applied all of the life skills I had learned through my homeschooling adventures to getting a good score on this test. Things like organization skills, self-motivation, time-blocking, etc.
But testing was only a part of it. An application has many different components, and even more so for me being worldschooled. I didn’t have options like class president or mathletes, soccer or chess club, I was forced to look outside of myself and my immediate surroundings for extracurricular things to do. Fortunately life on a boat offered many new and exciting experiences for a scrappy fourteen year old girl. I volunteered, doing everything from tracking elephants in the Namibian desert for an NGO to taking water samples in the Malacca strait for a research project. I grabbed every opportunity that came into sight.
My parents actively sought out opportunities, sometimes with my transcript in mind but also just for plain old fun. I followed my interests, getting SCUBA and freediving certifications and curating one-on-one courses that incorporated hands-on projects. For example in my junior year of high school, I took a one-on-one Marine Science course with Jenny Bourassa, this course allowed me to explore new interests while also incorporating hands-on experience in the field. Being in Indonesia I had amazing access to incredibly rich and beautiful marine wildlife. I performed small citizen science activities, guided by Jenny, and alongside my little sister who was doing an 8th grade version of the class. All of these experiences added to my transcript, yet they would’ve been nothing without a key component. I wrote a lot. And at the end of four years I had a bullet-proof transcript, and a collection of glowing essays that have taken me far.
In my experience, homeschooling was the ultimate college hack.
Applying to college is a daunting task for students and parents alike. It demands hard work and smart choices, risk and reward. But the application is only the first step in a journey that will last the next four years and even the rest of your life.
