I found the actual results threads done by individual students to be more helpful than result threads for individual schools. So i decided to post my results in hopes of helping someone else!
lol this is really long I’m sorry
SAT: 1480 (760 math, 720 reading)
SAT II: 700 math 2, 650 literature (didn’t submit to any schools but Cornell.)
Unweighted GPA (out of 4.0): 3.9
Rank (percentile if rank is unavailable): applied as 3/350 but by midyear was 1/350
AP (place score in parenthesis): AP Calc: 4, didn’t send other scores
IB (place score in parenthesis): didn’t send and don’t remember
Senior Year Course Load: IB Math HL, AP Calc BC, IB English Lit HL, IB Spanish V SL, TOK, IB History of the Americas HL, IB Biology HL Y2
Major Awards (USAMO, Intel etc.): National Merit Scholar (no one cares), AP Scholar (again no one cares), Honorable Mention at Math Olympiad (and again, no one cares)
Extracurriculars
Writing and Publishing my novel, 9-12
National Honors Society, 10-12 (Secretary)
Writing Club, 10-12 (President and Co-Founder)
Oceans Bowl/Science Club, 10-12 (Captain)
Book Club, 10-12
Youth Committee Member, 10-12
Peer Tutor, 10-12
High School Journal of Science Peer Reviewer, 10-12
Job/Work Experience: High school research intern (would disclose school but would reveal identity)
Volunteer/Community service: Stuff with the Youth Committee, Peer Tutoring (I do a lot of stuff for church, but did not include it on my college application purely because I’m not religious and did not want to be viewed in that way. Also, my volunteering @ church is very personal to me and I just didn’t want to include it.)
Summer Activities: High school research intern, some medical camps around my state (pm for specifics, don’t want to reveal identity)
Essays (rating 1-10, details):
Common App: ?/10
It was about how I discovered myself through the process of writing my novel. Everyone in real life told me that it was a good essay and made minor changes. But someone on here really hated it, so I ended up really hating it because for some reason I construed college confidential as this admissions expert that the adults in my life couldn’t compare to. But it ended up pulling through.
Supplements:
Yale: 0/10
My Yale supplements were bad.
Harvard: 8/10
I thought my Harvard supplement was pretty good.
Princeton: 7/10
I thought it was decent.
JHU: 8/10
I’m not sure if I would classify my JHU supplement as GOOD, but it was creative and maybe unique. Basically I compared my leadership in an extracurricular I didn’t include on my app to being a 19th century British imperialist.
UChicago: ?/10
I ended up picking an old prompt because UChicago prompts are impossible. Looking back now, I think I submitted my best work here, but at the time I thought my app here was a garbage fire. For the Why Uchicago essay, I complained about Harvard and UMich and said that UChicago was better than both of them. For the other supplement, I talked about exploring the world through writing.
Cornell + UPenn + Northwestern + Duke+ Carnegie Mellon: 11/10
They all asked the “why do you want to attend” question as their supplement, and I used the same general format for all my essays. I basically pretended like I was on Tinder searching for colleges and did this whole “love at first site” thing. If you’re confused, pm for details.
UMich: 7/10
My supplements were decent. Not my best work.
UCs: 7/10
I did these the night before and essentially my essays were a compilation of all the other essays I wrote.
Recommendations:
1: My english teacher is an amazing writer and person. We have a good relationship and I know whatever she wrote must’ve been fantastic. 11/10
2: My history teacher insisted that I read this letter, or else I wouldn’t have. Despite me only knowing him for mere months, wrote this AMAZING letter and literally wrote at the end that he was going to miss me. 11/10
3: My physics teacher LOVED me but he’s not that good at recommendation letters. We did this research project together so we are pretty close, and at the very least he probably explained that project more in depth. I honestly only included it because I put a stem major on my application and I thought colleges would be suspicious if I didn’t put a science teacher on my app. 9/10
4: My calc teacher is a good friend of mine and we joke around with each other all the time. Someone else who used him last year (class of 2021) got into Duke and claimed that he wrote something really personal, so I’m going to assume that he did a fairly good job this time. 9/10
5: I read this one once again out of my teacher’s insistence. Me and my spanish teacher fostered a very close friendship (well, close for student/teacher), but he isn’t that good at recommendation letters. I would consider this to be my weakest letter, as it was literally just a summary of my extracurriculars with three or four sentences actually describing how he sees me. Can’t remember what schools I sent it to though. 7/10
Note: i didn’t really send all 5 recommendations to any other college other than umich. I mixed and matched depending on school. PM for details.
Counselor Rec: Me and my counselor have a good relationship (okay I’m making it sound like I hang out with teachers at lunch–I swear I’m a normal kid), but my school doesn’t really have a lot of experience with getting kids to top institutions so I’m not really sure if this was a persuasive letter. However, I don’t think it was negative. 8/10
Additional Rec: My professor from the research program wrote this letter. I know it was not negative for reasons I cannot disclose because I don’t want to reveal my identity, but I’m not entirely sure how personal it was. We got along well, but I didn’t actually get to talk to him much throughout the program.
Interview: Okay, I tried to avoid interviews by ALL means. Due to my social anxiety, I find it difficult to talk to unknown authority figures and therefore I come off as completely different from who I actually am. (Yeah, I know, I’m going to have to rectify that before applying for a job). Luckily because of my location, most of the schools I applied to did not have interviewers for me.
Princeton: It was a free flowing conversation, but one thing that made me nervous was that the interviewer really seemed to not like Princeton and said that the grade deflation there ruined her GPA and made it difficult for her to get into med schools.
Harvard: It was okay until she asked about my SAT score. I literally admitted that I could’ve studied more but chose not to because I’d rather do other things. In hindsight that probably wasn’t the smartest thing to tell her.
Yale: It was okay, but the interviewer literally TIMED the interview. (A literal ALARM on his phone went off.) Also, he sneakily asked a “why yale” question, and I didn’t realize until hours later that that was what he was really asking.
Stanford: This was my favorite interview by far. She was also a black woman and she was younger, so I did not feel as anxious talking to her and I was able to be myself.
Other
Applied for Financial Aid?: of course
Intended Major and College: Biology + Creative Writing
State: Michigan
School Type: Suburban public
Ethnicity: African-American
Gender: Female
Income Bracket: 100k>
Accepted:
Upenn
Duke
Cornell
Johns Hopkins
UChicago
Northwestern
UCLA
Vanderbilt
Carnegie Mellon
Case Western
Washington University in St. Louis
University of Michigan
-Loyola Chicago
Rejected:
-Harvard
-Princeton
-Yale
-UC Berkeley (lol)
Waitlisted
-Stanford
-Dartmouth
Why I was accepted: Relative to my area, I was able to create opportunities/find opportunities to myself that were impressive. Also, my essays might’ve been unique.