So I’m a junior in high school and have had my eye on attending Boston College since I was really young. I have worked quite a bit for it but sadly I’m falling a little short. my GPA is a little below the average because I took some classes that I was not good at. my uncle is friends with a man who runs the endowment fund there and I was wondering if he could pull some strings to help me get in.
It’s another thing if your uncle was the guy controlling the endowment fund, but a friend of your uncle is a lot of degrees of separation. You can try, but I doubt that he will help you out, especially if he doesn’t know you personally. Also that would be an awkward position to put your uncle in unless YOU have a personal relationship with the guy.
Instead of trying to pull strings to get in, why don’t you work harder to improve your gpa, standardized testing, and extracurriculars?
BC is so popular and their network so wide, everyone has connections so you really need to bring the grades/test scores to be competitive.
Really, really try to pull up GPA and SAT/ACT scores.
When choosing classes for next year, make sure to take some rigorous classes; BC will see what you’re taking next year and they will look to see if you’re taking the most rigorous classes you can. (Don’t overburden yourself, though, that may hurt your GPA in the long run so be careful.)
When writing common app and BC-specific essays, make sure to look them over and make sure they’re the best you can get them.
Also, if possible, see if you can either get a job or do something prominent this summer.
(All this work will pay off in the long run, but in the end, admissions is a coin toss, so if things end up not working out, it may just have been that when filling their class, they had too many people like you…who knows.)
I wish you the best of luck–maybe we’ll see each other at BC one day!