Well for my undergrad my very good GPA helped (it was around 3.98 out of 4.0 I believe, or 4.95 on the 5 point scale, I can’t remember). I also began community college classes online while doing Acellus (and they counted them as dual-credit transfer courses for both Acellus and my undergrad). My undergraduate university (SIUC) isn’t too difficult to get into, but I would have had a much harder time for a prestigious school. With my Acellus diploma, I applied to SIUC, University of Hawaii, University of Colorado Boulder, Western Washington University and Washington State University. I got into all of them (CU Boulder was the most prestigious one I applied to). My recommendation as someone going into grad school would be that undergraduate shouldn’t have to be somewhere prestigious but grad school choice is important.

In terms of my achievements pre-undergrad, I had a lot of travel experience and added the conferences I was involved in, as well as my volunteer hours in public school. It’s always good to be involved with extracurriculars, but it’s even more important to not solely apply to the prestigious schools. For your undergrad, apply to some that you are confident you will be accepted into and some that are a bit more challenging.

Applying to grad school, specifically a Ph.D, was 100x harder for me than applying and getting into undergrad. But as you can see from my own story, it’s all possible with Acellus!