B's in honors math and science courses..how bad does this affect me?

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

<p>Sooo I'm currently going into my senior year of hs, and here are my bare bones stats...</p>

<p>Rank:~30/540
GPA:~4.7 UW, 5.36 W (5 pt scale)
ACT: 36</p>

<p>I really hope to go into engineering. However, as far as grades go, all my math and science grades from frosh and soph years were b's. These WERE in honors classes, on the double-accelerated track at my school(calc bc as a junior). The reason for this is because math and science have always come easy to me. And for some reason in my warped thinking that made it more of an accomplishment to work super hard and squeak out an a in history or english than to work a little and do brilliantly in math/science. These b's were accomplished with literally zero effort. However in junior year I entered physics honors as well as calculus, both of which blew my mind in terms of diversity usefulness etc. I realized that the point of being gifted in a certain subject is not to slack off in that subject and get by, but to truly pass into brilliance. I got straight a's this year.</p>

<p>Now onto my question: my stats put me in range for some schools that I really like. Rice, northwestern, uchicago, vanderbilt, johns hopkins, to name a few. I would love to enter engineering at any of these (except uchicago, they don't have it). However, I feel nervous in applying to the engineering programs specifically because I feel like they'll look at the b's as well as lack of science/math exttracurriculars ( although my other ec's are quite good) and think that I'm not the engineering "type".</p>

<p>I think ill probably just end up explaining this in a fabulously-worded essay, but do y'all have any other advice as to what I can do to overcome this slight disadvantage??? Does this put me out of the running for some of these schools??? Kinda freakin out over here. Thanks!!!</p>

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<p>Your ACT will give you a strong chance at all of those schools, regardless of your B’s in a few classes.</p>

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<p>Well, if you got an A in Calculus BC as a junior and a 5 on the AP test, that certainly looks good.</p>

<p>There are plenty of other good schools for engineering.</p>

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<p>Try the schools that you want, and make sure that you have some safeties. There are only about 200 schools out there just waiting to give you a full ride based on your numbers.</p>

<p>They’ll look at your junior year grades first, and if they are perfect, and you have a perfect ACT and took Calc BC in 11th grade (believe it or not, there are kids accepted into the engineering schools at the schools you mentioned who won’t have taken Calc BC by the time they graduate), you will look strong academically. Not many kids get a 36, as you know (stop panicking needlessly, in other words).</p>

<p>You don’t necessarily need EC’s that are math/science-related. A lot of schools would prefer to see other types of ECs, especially leadership-based or community service EC’s, for engineers (the Ivy schools certainly would prefer that). It can make you look less nerdy. The engineer with only engineering-type EC’s can look dreadfully boring, and remember that the admissions officer gets to read about more math teams than you can imagine. He or she might be more interested to hear about you taking a bunch of boy scouts whitewater canoeing.</p>