Medium sized (~1300 total students) public high school, school is extremely competitive academic wise (98% of my graduating class has an U/W GPA >3.4).
Gender/Race/Ethnicity (optional): Male/White/non-enrolled Native American but have clear tribal ties (I plan to write my essays something along the lines of how my Native American heritage ties into my passion of pursuing a career in medicine.
Other special factors: double legacy at a specific ivy (not mentioning that school by name as I already have enough personal specific info to identify me).
Intended Major(s): Biology on pre-med track, possibly Spanish as additional major (if not minor). Native American studies or Ethnic studies major/minor at schools where offered.
GPA, Rank, and Test Scores
Unweighted HS GPA: 3.95
Weighted HS GPA (incl. weighting system): 4.4 out of 5.0 (will go up after S2 of junior year grades are finalized, freshman year I went to a different school where everything was 4.0 weighted, all my classes junior and senior year are/will be 5.0 weighted).
Class Rank: Top 10%
ACT/SAT Scores: applying test optional (high 1300s)
Coursework
International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme
Higher Level: Biology, Chemistry, Psychology
Standard Level: English, Math A&I, Spanish
Awards
placed in category in state science fair (middle school)
placed in category in regional science fair (middle school)
Broadcom MASTERS nomination
1st place student choice winner in regional science fair (high school)
State science fair nomination (high school)
Honor roll every semester
2x selection for prestigious sporting event in other states as referee (youngest from state selected, I am considered in the top 1% of referees for this sport in my state)
Extracurriculars
refereeing sport (top 1% of referees in state, don’t want to get too specific)
clinical volunteer at 2 area hospitals (one of which by very selective competitive application process)
set goal to raise over 100k for specific non-profit, chaired team that raised 10s of thousands
leadership positions at 4 organizations
president of student advisory council at non-profit (council has >15 members)
competed in science fair 3 years, placed 2/3 years (see awards)
Essays/LORs/Other
Strong LORs, Strong unique essay that ties in my ambitions (specific field of medicine as a doctor) to my family heritage (native american)
Cost Constraints / Budget
Not a factor, I am fortunate enough to not have to consider budget while choosing a college. I will not qualify for any need based aid.
Schools
Please provide schools for the safety/target/reach categories
As of now, I plan on applying ED to Northwestern… what are my chances?
Plan on applying to several ivies (I am a double legacy at one of them)
Look at Sections C9-C12 of the Common Data Set for Northwestern. This will give you information of the statistics of matriculated students from the past several years, and may help you to compare yourself with those entering students.
what does your HS’s naviance data show? Check how many kids with your stats get accepted at the colleges you are interested in, AND how many get rejected.
Northwestern some how has gotten away with leaving many sections blank on the CDS.
In terms of test scores, I fall a little bit below the 25th percentile so I plan on applying test optional and they won’t disclose what percent of their last accepted class didn’t submit test schools (most schools will and their admissions officers will provide a percent upon request but I’ve asked their reps multiple times and they say the school has chosen to not release this).
I am a very strong student yet a bad standardized test taker. I am taking the ACT this summer and will submit that score if it’s “good”
If you are looking for safety/target/match suggestions, some of your preferences would be helpful: school size, location, religious affiliations, Greek life, etc. What are you looking for in a school?
Also, do not list any middle school awards or ECs on your application.
Well that’s an excellent idea, the only issue is that the Naviance data ends at 2017. For the last year they reported data, 7 applied, 2 accepted, 2 enrolled. Years before that are very similar.
The graph of people accepted varies widely with people with mid 20s ACT scores and average GPAs accepted to people with high 1500s SAT scores and high GPAs denied… Really inconsistent
Those are good considerations that I forgot, thanks for the reminder! Size: Don’t want something larger than 30k students or smaller than 2500. Honestly size doesn’t matter too much to me. Location: Not in the south, open to everywhere else Religious affiliations: Would prefer the school have no strong affiliation Greek life: Don’t really know if I want to participate so not a deal breaker either way. Don’t want a huge party school.
In regards to not listing ECs, a lot of people including my GC said to list at list the ECs that I listed above as they all all higher level than most and would make me a more competitive applicant. Why would you avoid listing these? (Genuinely curious, I’m only going off info I have from a few people so I’m really curious to hear your and other’s thoughts)
You should omit ECs and awards from middle school as schools don’t care about those. On the other hand, ECs from HS are very important. Also, you should be very specific when you talk about how you raised $100k for charity as AO’s are likely to be skeptical about a teenager raising so much money.
Your middle school EC’s don’t make you more “competitive”. Colleges are institutions of higher learning, first and foremost. So the rigor of your transcript, your grades, and scores if/when you provide them do the heavy lifting- the EC’s make you come alive as a person, but nobody is going to say, “Oooh look, Joey did science fair in 7th grade- we want him over Susie who only did it in HS”.
98% of students having a GPA over 3.4 suggests some grade inflation going on… so I’d suggest some intense SAT prep to validate you being in the top 10%. No social studies/history???
When I see “pre-med”, three things come to mind.
One is budget. Medical school is expensive. You should check with your parents whether any money you don’t spend for undergrad can be saved and applied to the cost of medical school. Even doctors do not make enough for it to be easy to pay off the cost of medical school. You should budget for a full 8 years of university where the last 4, by the time that you get there, are likely to cost more than $100,000 per year (except maybe if you stay in-state).
The second thing that comes to mind is “what is plan B”? The majority of students who go off to university thinking that they are premed do not end up applying to medical school. The majority of students who apply to medical school do not get in anywhere. One thing to think about is what else you might do if you do not end up going to medical school. Then find a university that would be a good fit in this case.
The third thing that comes to mind is that there are a LOT of universities that are very good for premeds. You have at least two of them in-state (University of Colorado and Colorado State University).
I understand that your CSU (the one in Colorado rather than the other CSUs in some other state) is not super highly ranked overall. It did however recently move from being ranked #3 in North America to #2 in North America (just ahead of Cornell) for Veterinary Medicine. Veterinary medicine overlaps some with regular medicine (at least for undergrad). My understanding is that for undergrads the required premed classes and the required pre-vet classes are in fact the same. One daughter was pre-vet (she is now half way through a DVM program) and many of her friends from the same undergraduate classes were premed. CSU really is that good for veterinary medicine. If nothing else, this suggests that it has some professors and some graduate students wandering around campus who really know their stuff.
The really top universities, such as the Ivy League schools, do get a higher percentage of their undergraduate students into medical school. However this is very likely due to the excellent students who start at Ivy League and equivalent schools in the first place. If the goal is medical school four years later then it is not clear whether any one student would be better off arriving at Harvard or Northwestern in the middle third of the incoming students or arriving at U.Colorado in the top third of the incoming students. My best guess is that which undergraduate university you attend really does not matter that much in terms of what your chances are of getting into a good MD program. It might matter more in terms of “plan B” if you end up going that way.
A forth thing that occurs to me is that being bilingual with solid Spanish skills will be quite helpful in the event that you do graduate with an MD in a few years.
I think that your chances are actually quite good at the top schools. You should think quite a bit about which university is a good fit for you. I think that you are likely to have multiple very good options when the time comes. Do however make sure that you apply to at least one and preferable at least two solid and affordable safeties.
Also be aware of how difficult premed classes are going to be. My wife and both daughters all had majors that overlapped a lot with premed classes, and I have heard a lot of stories about difficult classes and difficult exams. Exams with class averages in the forties or fifties are not unheard of, and this is among a strong set of students.
I will omit the 2 awards from MS science fairs (should I even omit the nomination to the national fair?) and stick to just the HS stuff (everything else I listed is HS activities/ECs.
And yes, that is an excellent point to be specific about how x amount of money was raised. I did that for my IB CAS Project (for those of you who aren’t familiar with IB, essentially think of that as a student-initiative project that exceeds 50 hours of work and benefits the world in some way. I logged 90 hours for mine in the strands of service and creativity). Having done this as a CAS Project, I already have a lot of documentation/explanation for what I learned from this experience and how I made the most of it.
Not quite sure if there is grade inflation, our courses are very difficult and it is hard to earn an A unless you are at the very top of the class. While this is a public (non-charter) school, nearly 70% of students open enroll. All these students want to come to this school and often want to because of the IB Diploma Program and opportunity to take both AP/IB courses. These students are looking for rigor and thus the vast majority of our student body is competitive students who will earn Cs and Bs with a handful of As in the hardest courses.
This has a 2 part explanation;
(1) IB classifies psychology as a social studies course. It takes the place of history in my schedule for junior/senior year.
(2) I attended a different high school in freshman year. I earned 1.0 history credit (a full year/2 semesters worth) for a 3 week long experiential learning program that reads as " Lewis & Clark Exp." on my transcript.
Is this situation in history/social studies going to make me a less competitive applicant? Should I try to add a AP history course of some sort for next year?
How have other competitive candidates for top schools handled this-- do they take the traditional US History and Euro History survey courses? I don’t think Psych is a good substitute for a rigorous history course!
My school has it setup where AP Government is a required course unless you are doing IBDP. Many STEM focused students take IBDP to get out of this graduation requirement and take psychology instead. I have never heard of someone being concerned that psych is not “a substitute for a rigorous history course”. IB Psych is regarded as one of the most difficult IB courses and contains more material than almost every IB course in existence.
I’ll ask around and see what people have done but haven’t ever heard this come up!
Thanks for your very helpful response that touches on so many important points. Really excellent post!
I know that my future plans are very costly. My hope would be to return to Colorado for medical school and attend University of Colorado Denver Anschutz. That is an extremely selective school and would be very difficult to get in to. I am setting realistic expectations but also know that one can dream. One of the pros of attending CU for med school is that it would likely run at $50-70k year for me (I know I would get a rate lower than the in-state advertised) which is less expensive that many other options.
Plan B is definitely in the works. I’m ambitious but realistic. I might be laughed at for this but I say it completely genuinely and after having put a lot of thought into it. Plan B isn’t my biggest concern right now. Wherever I go, I know that plan B can happen.
I will apply to CU Boulder on our free-app day and keep it on my list as a safety but I really have no interest in any other Colorado school. I know a lot of people who have gone to CSU and loved it and it works out great for some. As you mentioned they have an awesome veterinary medicine program. I know CSU is not the school for me and have absolutely zero interest in even applying (that is not meant to be a knock on the school or anyone who goes there).
Again, cheers for the awesome response! I’ve tried to keep my response to your short-ish so that I don’t keep repeating everything and so it doesn’t seem like I’m countering everything you said (I really have thought through what you said and will keep it all in mind). Thnaks!
If you truly intend to go to medical school, then please for heaven’s sake don’t choose the most grade deflating college. Go to a place where you can get a high GPA. And have time to study for the MCAT. There is no test optional for medical school apps.
Medical schools don’t really care about relative prestige of undergrad. They also don’t take into account difficulty of major. So engineering/physics majors are somewhat of a disadvantage.
The good news is that your native status might really help tip the scale.
I haven’t previously been concerned about NW being grade deflating because don’t med school AOs know this? Don’t they take this into account to the point and know that a 3.5 at Northwestern is like a 3.9 at many other places?
But also, this is “Match Me!”. I’m open to someone saying “I think you’d really really like xyz University/College”. Maybe I will love that school and decide to apply ED there instead and I wouldn’t have considered it if no one recommended it. Please feel free to drop some recommendations for other schools.
It might but I’m also not an enrolled tribal citizen so have to keep that in mind.
In the 2021-22 CDS they show 6 Natuve Americans so it’s a HUGE PLUS I’m guessing. They note it’s considered.
But rigor is paramount and you say that English, Math and Spanish are at a standard level. I’m not sure how IB works but if there’s a higher level, I’d assume your odds would be very tough.
Have targets and safeties. If it’s the dream and it’s affordable, give it a go
But if my interpretation of your classes is accurate, it’s unlikely.