American Experience | 体验美国

My Coming to America Story

June 13, 2014 10:27 am | By Roger

Happy Student

It was in my second year of high school when I decided to go to the U.S. for college. I did poorly on my high school entrance exam, so I couldn’t stay in my previous school, the best school in my city. I made my decision to go abroad then, because given the quality of my high school, I figured that the chance of getting into a top university was quite small for me. I did my college application by myself, so I can speak from experience.

First, TOEFL and SAT scores are required as part of the application. I took courses at New Oriental Education. I studied TOEFL two years before my graduation. I took the first TOEFL exam. I then studied for the SAT another half year, followed by taking the SAT exam. After knowing the first two scores, I could kind of get an idea about in what range of colleges that I would likely be admitted. Then I started my college search. The SAT official website is a very useful searching tool. I could set different searching criteria such as the rank of business school and the location of the college, integrated with my test scores to gain my candidate schools. There are also plenty of website sources that we can use to search colleges. Searching for a college is a very important task because although transferring is relatively easy in the US, you would still have to wait two years before being able to attend another university if the first college doesn’t fit you. I started my college application half year before graduation. Since I did my application process myself and I had no experience completing one, I was very conservative in that I only applied to those colleges that I had a huge probability of getting accepted by. I sent my application to eight colleges and I got offers from all of them. Ohio State University was the best among my list and it sent me offer the fastest, so I accepted its offer without waiting to consider others.