College Soccer Camp
Information About All Soccer Camps

Traveling and Need Ideas To Help Me Get Into West Point!?

Alright. This is a long and complicated story, but I'm going to try and summarize it as much as I can. Around 4 years ago, my parents decided to do something different, and so they bought and RV, rented out our house, took me and my brother out of school, and started traveling the country. I'm home-schooled (using an online academy called K12 www.k12.com) and have been ever since we started traveling. I have seen every state in the US (except Alaska) around twice. We've been traveling constantly, and on average stay a week in one place. My parents own their own company called TechnoRV (www.technorv.com). We are vendors at RV rallies, and that's where we sell our products. So we basically travel from rally to rally, selling and opening a booth.
I am a freshman and I am very interested in attending West Point. I'll tell you a bit about myself. I'm female, 5 '9' to 5 '10'. I'm advanced in my school work and work very hard. Even though I'm a freshman, I'm doing sophmore and junior year work. I'm taking Spanish and honors classes. I'm very athletic. Before we started traveling ever summer and winter I was on a soccer team, and was nominated to the professional junior soccer team before we moved. Now, I try and play soccer whenever I can. I love running, and try and compete in races and triathlons when I can. I run around 6 miles, 5 times a day. My mile time is 6.2 minutes. I work out in the mornings for around 30 to 40 minutes, 6 days a week (on top of my morning run). I'm following a military fitness program right now. I have a part-time job, working for a close friend at the rallies we go to. A few months ago I volunteered at an animal shelter in Albuquerque and clocked around 80 volunteer hours.
I've read through everything West Point looks for in its applicants. The problem I have is that it looks for people who are on debate teams, are class presidents, are on sport teams or are team captains, etc. I can't do these things while I'm traveling. I can't join a sport's team because we're not in one place long enough. I've looked at summer camps, but my parents don't have enough money to send me to one. I can't join clubs or join church or youth groups. I feel stuck and helpless! I've talked to my parents about settling down and stopping the traveling, but they didn't listen to me. We already have rallies booked all through next year too! Does anyone have any ideas? Please help me!

Public Comments

1. Look at attending a boarding school where you don't have to be with your parents. Financial aid+ your job should be enough to pay for the tuition if you are that dead set on westpoint.

2. Work to do well in math and science. Learn as much as you can about mechanics and similar subjects. Those will help you do well on the ASVAB test and sometimes scoring well on that is a first step to getting an invitation to Westpoint.

Just because you are traveling doesn't mean that you can't show leadership skills in other ways. Organize something yourself, perhaps for your parents' products, or selling some new products of your own at the rallies. Organize things with the children of other people whom you might regularly run into at these rallies (assuming that there are some other families doing something similar to yours). Or organize some events for the children of people who come to these rallies. Or join some national organization that you are interested in, whether online or however, and organize some events for them at the places you visit, or online, or something. Or figure out something else that will work for you wherever you are because what they really want to see is evidence of leadership abilities, not sitting around letting others tell you what to do but getting some other people to follow you and do something. (And even if it doesn't get you into Westpoint, it will help you make something of yourself in whatever life holds for you.)

Or another possibility is to see if you can talk your parents into letting you lead a more settled life. You've said that they don't want to do that, but have you proposed the idea of letting you live with a relative or close friend in order to go to a single brick-and-mortar high school--if you feel that's important to meeting your life goals? (I've known parents who've done that for their children when they weren't willing to change their own lifestyle but were concerned about their children's future, too.)

Good luck.