Before you post your chances thread...

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
1

<p>Please, please, please reconsider. Reconsider posting them on this board, reconsider posting them on the “What are my chances?” forum.</p>

<p>Every student who posts a chances thread here is obviously interested in the school and probably even has questions about it. I (and I think other posters who are current students or parents) would much, much rather answer questions about the school than we would evaluate your chances.</p>

<p>I like to think I’m an expert on this school: I’ve been inside every dormitory, know the lowdown on concentrations and professors, know lots and lots and lots of clubs, research opportunities going on, and have gone so far as to design visit itineraries in PMs to visiting students. In short, I like to be helpful, and I like procrastinating via the internet, so we have a good thing going here.</p>

<p>So, reasons it’s silly to post your chances thread:</p>

<li><p>I’m not an admissions officer. None of us (except Libby, who doesn’t really post here, and Admissions_Daniel, who posts frequently on the Hopkins boards), are. If I wanted to, I could tell you all that you are going to get in because you all have higher SAT and ACT scores than me (you do), but if I know anything about admissions, I know it doesn’t quite work that way. Most of the people who “chance” you are your own “competition” for these schools-- in other words, they’ll be the first to shoot you down, if they can. “YOUR EC’S ARE WEAK.” “RAISE THAT SAT SCORE.” That’s the last thing you need to hear as a high school senior, and it’s probably not even true.</p></li>
<li><p>Even if we were admissions officers, admissions decisions are not made in a vacuum. They are made by committees (usually) and files are read one after another. Admissions officers have access to all sorts of pertinent information that isn’t shared here, like where your parents went to college (if they went to college), your high school’s history or lack thereof with their school, whether you’ve visited campus, and probably most importantly, your essays and teacher recs. If anything “got” me in, it was probably my teacher recs and essays, which, together, painted a very particular picture of me as a student and person that my SAT and GPA were nowhere near close to capturing. If Chicago’s admissions office is anything like Wesleyan’s in “The Gatekeepers,” there are many, many, many extraneous factors in the decision process that have nothing to do with you and you couldn’t control anyway.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>Admissions officers are also humans and very prone to mistakes. One of the most “Chicago” people I know (i.e. smart, fits in here like none other, etc.) was deferred EA. (I think a couple of low grades were a concern). We all know of people who should have gotten into school Y or Z and, for whatever reasons, didn’t. Life stinks sometimes. That’s why you need to consider schools that are still quality schools and are less selective.</p>

<li> The best information available for you regarding admissions is your admissions officer, who will probably point you towards that school’s profile. Chicago’s school profile is enormously helpful in determining where you may fit in among current students. That information is here:</li>
</ol>

<p><a href=“http://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/level3.asp?id=377[/url]”>http://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/level3.asp?id=377</a></p>

2

<p>Listen to unalove! She is right!</p>

<p>Let me add a couple of generic points and a couple of Chicago-specific points.</p>

<p>It's especially hard to "chance" Chicago, in either direction. On the one hand, it accepts a pretty high proportion of its applicants. That's because it has a really strong applicant pool, and lots of them wind up with lots of choices. But it does mean -- and I've seen this a lot over the years -- that Chicago can be forgiving of one or two "flaws" in a student's record. It can be more rational than HYP, because it doesn't HAVE to turn everyone down. However, there's no question that essays and recommendations bear a lot of weight at Chicago -- more than at many other schools -- and pure grades and test scores, and ECs, too, somewhat less (but certainly not nothing, far from it). Those things can't be judged in any "chances" thread. So you are really not going to learn a lot, here, even from the people who will try to answer you in good faith.</p>

<p>Here's the generic thing: When you are looking at a profile, remember that it's a profile of the enrolled class, not of the people who applied or the people who were accepted. No school that I know of gives out those stats. I don't KNOW, but I strongly, strongly suspect two things:</p>

<p>(1) in the case of almost every school, the applicant pool is weaker, stat-wise, than the enrolled pool, and
(2) in the case of almost every school except HYPS, the accepted student pool is significantly stronger, stat-wise, than the enrolled pool.</p>

<p>The second point follows from the observation that kids with high test scores and high GPAs, on the whole, seem to wind up with a bunch of choices. So for any particular, school, they are the ones who are most likely to go elsewhere. The admittees with the lowest scores will often be thrilled to have been accepted at their "reach", and will turn into enrolled students at a much higher rate. At a school like Chicago, the top 25% of its enrolled students may reflect the stats of half or more of the people who were accepted, and the bottom 25% of enrollees may reflect 10% or less of the acceptees.</p>

<p>Also, recognize that far fewer than 25% of all enrolled students -- maybe hardly any -- will be in the bottom 25% for ALL of the categories -- math SAT, CR SAT, high school GPA.</p>

3

<p>Also, look through old admissions results threads. Seeing the stats of people who were actually accepted would be more helpful than having people tell you that you might or might not get in. Of course, the obvious caveat is that if in a previous year someone with similar stats as you got accepted or rejected, you shouldn't take that as a reflection of your own fate. In general, though, those threads are more informative than responses to a chance thread.</p>

<p>So if you're curious, here are the EA and RD results threads for the class of 2011:
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=276516%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=276516&lt;/a>
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=319005%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=319005&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

4

<p>I felt it was time to bump this thread... I'm anticipating the "chance thread" downpour.</p>

5

<p>I should also mention that the really "Chicago" kid in the OP was admitted RN (phew) but decided, after a long and hard think, to go elsewhere.</p>

<p>Chicago's loss. I think if they admitted him EA, he would have been ours to keep, and he wouldn't have the complex feelings of going to a school that first deferred and then admitted him-- that's like the boyfriend that breaks up with you and then offers to get back together.</p>

6

<p>thank you, unalove! Sometimes I need to stop, take a moment, and keep my desire for "affirmation" in check. The main reason I asked is that my school's valedictorian last year got waitlisted at UofC, and as this year's val., I'm concerned lol</p>

<p>I do have lots of questions about UofC, though! How is the financial aid, first of all? I'm basically straight-up middle class, so I can't afford 40 Gs a year.</p>

7

<p>Unfortunately, they will have a much higher opinion of your family's place in the middle class than you do (by the way their estimated cost for 2008-09 was between $53 and $54k). However, they do give Merit Scholarships.</p>

8

<p>As I mentioned, hookem, there are a lot of factors that go into an admissions decision, not just the numbers-based ones. You are not your predecessors.</p>

<p>As far as FA, your "solidly middle class" might qualify you for an Odyssey Scholarship.</p>

<p>The</a> University of Chicago: Odyssey Scholarships</p>

<p>There's also a brilliant graphic from the NYT that clearly shows how Chicago and other elite schools stack up as far as salary guidelines for FA:
<a href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/20/education/edlife/20leonhardt.650.1.jpg%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/20/education/edlife/20leonhardt.650.1.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

9

<p>i think chicago is a perfect fit for me and i think i'm gonna apply early action, and hopefully get in! my only question is that i've always wanted to double major in econ and philosophy but i'm afraid that at the u of c cause of the core curriculum and the supposedly enormous amount of homework i won't be able to do this. do you know anyone who double majors and is it humanly possible given that people with one major say that they have an unbelieveable amount of work?
also i just remembered one more question. i grew interested in econ from reading freakonomics. are econ classes more like reading the book or do they mainly involve doing immensely complicated problem sets (cause math isn't my favorite subject)? thx.</p>

10

<p>1) Yes, you can double major in something like econ and philosophy (two majors with few/zero overlapping classes). The only major I think would be hard to double-major in would be a major like biochem and something else... but that's because biochem is essentially two majors anyway.</p>

<p>2) Double majoring in econ and philosophy wouldn't give you more homework, I don't think, than a "typical" student here. Classes at Chicago come in two varieties: hard and harder. Hard is not synonymous with impossible, though, and I imagine that very very very few, if any, students find the workload here impossible.</p>

<p>3) Check out our economics listings-- economics is quite mathy, but exactly how mathy, I don't know.</p>

<p><a href="http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/pdf_09/ECON.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/pdf_09/ECON.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>In the future, make questions you have into separate threads so that other people can see them categorized.</p>