<p>First of all, congrats on your acceptances and sorry to hear about Haverford! I wish you good luck with your plans. Personally, I’d choose UCSC, but that is of course up to you.</p>
<p>Secondly, great thread! I think those of us who’ve made chance threads here in the past should probably post links to them and/or summaries of the responses, to help future generations of chancing gurus calibrate their algorithms :)</p>
<hr>
<p>Okay, here’s my thread:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/what-my-chances/1058046-id-appreciate-your-input.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/what-my-chances/1058046-id-appreciate-your-input.html</a></p>
<p>And the schools I applied to were:</p>
<p>University of Chicago
Reed
Vassar
Mount Holyoke
Union College
Trinity U (TX)
DePauw U
Sewanee
Whitman</p>
<hr>
<p>This is my academic profile:</p>
<p>Gender: F
Location: international
College Class Year: 2015
High School: Private
High School Type: sends many grads to top schools
Will apply for financial aid: Yes</p>
<p>Academics:</p>
<p>GPA - Unweighted: 3.30</p>
<p>Scores:</p>
<p>SAT I Math: 770
SAT I Critical Reading: 780
SAT I Writing: 800
SAT II Literature: 800
SAT II French: 720</p>
<p>Extracurriculars:</p>
<p>Significant Extracurriculars: art & design, journalism & translation, drama & musical, psychology club, ecology club
Leadership positions: a couple, but ‘leadership’ is stretching it
Volunteer/Service Work: the school library, a community center
Honors and Awards: one essay award</p>
<hr>
<p>Most people who responded to my thread thought that Vassar & UChicago were my most obvious reaches. Some people said that applying for financial aid as an international would hurt me, and others said that most of the schools on my list should be easy because of my test scores.</p>
<p>I think the consensus was that I’d get into most of my schools–which was quite flattering, and isn’t this the whole point of this forum–with UChi and Vassar being the clear exceptions.</p>
<hr>
<p>Here are my actual results:</p>
<p>University of Chicago - waitlisted
Reed - accepted/attending
Vassar - rejected
Mount Holyoke - accepted
Union College - rejected
Trinity U (TX) - accepted
DePauw U - accepted
Sewanee - rejected
Whitman - waitlisted</p>
<hr>
<p>In conclusion, some people seemed to underestimate the difficulty of securing financial aid as an international and didn’t take it into account when they chanced me–I know that Sewanee rejected me because of money, and DePauw didn’t offer me enough aid. At the same time, strangely, UChicago didn’t reject me outright, which I consider a great success given my GPA and abysmal academic record (my transcript is not just full of Bs, nor does it reveal an upward trend; it’s a consistent record of Cs and Ds in the sciences and As and Bs in the humanities). Unsurprisingly, Vassar rejected me, though my awful CommonApp essay, which I changed for my other schools, didn’t help my case at all.</p>
<p>I will matriculate at one of my two top choices and am very happy with the way things turned out.</p>