Getting into a top 20 school after taking two years off

[mike28]

Recently I've been doing lots of research on different colleges, and plan on going back full time in the fall. I think playing poker professionally for the past two years or so has really given me some great insight on on life, and ironically enough, has helped me mature a ton.

So, I've made the decision to pursue college seriously now. I don't want to go to random state university x and get by with a C average. I feel like if I am going to devote myself fully to my education, there's no reason I shouldn't strive to go to the best university possible.

Herein lies the problem. Getting into Dartmouth/Emory isn't exactly easy. Tons of overqualified students get deferred or flat out rejected every year. My piss poor freshman year of college, plus taking two years off to make tons of money playing poker doesn't exactly give me the perfect track record it pretty much takes to be considered at these schools.

How does one go about applying after taking time off from college? How does the adcom perceive it? How much weighting is done on high school performance, college performance?

Here's a little bit of my academia history-

High school was well, high school. I held a B average in a course load full of APs. Multiple Varsity spots, lots of great ECs (SGA president etc). Pretty much your stereotypical popular kid I guess. Had pretty excellent test scores. I figured my ECs/Test scores were on par with most kids applying to the big name universities, but my GPA was lackluster.

Then came college. I went to a sub-par out of state school on scholarship. Started making tons of money playing poker, decided college sucked. Joined a frat, pretty much drank and played video games all day. Being 19 and making more money per month than 90% of the college's graduates would make their first year really had some negative effects on my lifestyle. It was really fun though, a waste, but insanely fun. I guess my college career wasn't a complete disaster though, as I did debate on the national circuit and made some pretty big waves as a freshman. Won a bunch of awards, and debated mainly JV/Varsity.

So I dropped the majority of my classes second semester, and started living the dream life I suppose. It's been two years now, and I've learned a ton from the expierence.


So now that I've bored you to death, what's my line? I figure I can write a great essay on how playing professionally has really made me grow as a person, and helped me really understand what I want out of life. But at the same time my past two years have pretty much been void of anything that isn't traveling, making money, and playing video games.

Should I just go to a state university and really excel, then consider applying to the top schools? Would it be pretty much impossible given my track record?