School: Ranked Very Highly (Top 5 public school in NY, Top 50 in the country)
Strong Upward Trend (around 3.8 junior and 3.9 senior)
Course Rigor: All Honors Classes Freshman and Sophmore Year, Full IB Program Junior and Senior Year
Ethnicity: Caucasian
Financial Situation: Would be in the above 110K salary bracket but parents are paying off a large tax bill. Dad has a large salary, but the bill makes it difficult for me to full tuition.
Testing: ACT: 33 (In one sitting) 34 superscored
Intended Major: Biomedical engineering or environmental Engineering (Changes by the program at the school)
ECs: Pretty Strong, most of it is rooted in stem or environmental policy, topics which are very interrelated.
Recs: Counselor Rec 8/10, HL Bio Teacher 9/10 went from a 33 in the class to a 92 in the span of the semester ended with 92 and 96 as grades for the class, SL English Teacher 8/10, ended with a 93 and an 89, She sent me a passionate email about rectifying the 89 I got. (would have gotten A if not for the IB Oral Evaluation)
Schools I’m interested in:
WUSTL
Cornell
UVA
U Mich
RPI
Virginia Tech
Northeastern
GA Tech
UW Madison
UPenn
Rice
CUNY Grove
UMD College Park
Ohio State
Boston University
USC
Emory (3+2 Engineering with GA Tech)
You have a really good shot man! I would give you at least 75% of getting into all your schools maybe except Cornell. Make sure you write a really good essay though. The ivies really care about the essays. Most kids I talk to really underestimate this fact.
I have a typo its 4.34 and they use a 5.0 scale. I have taken all honors my first two years and IB classes for my upper class years. Never took a regular college prep course.
Look at the 25/75 numbers for each school in the common data set. If you at the 75 percentile, your odds should be close to the admission rate. Your 33 is fine. Your GPA is low.
USC had a 16% admission rate for 2017 and 31% of admitted students had a 4.0. I would expect many more were 3.9 or higher.
UPenn had a 9.3% admission rate. RD would have been lower because Penn likes ED. You can’t do ED because you need to see the financial aid package.
And that leads to the next conversation. If you can’t afford full tuition, you need to remove the OOS publics. Your stats aren’t high enough for merit. Publics don’t have as much aid to give to start with and many give none to OOS students.
Cornell will depend on if you are in one of the programs that benefits NY residents. I don’t know the details of how that works.
You need to ask your parents for a specific budget and run Net Price Calculators (NPC) for target schools. Room and Board alone is $12,500-14,500. That alone is a lot on $110,000. You don’t say how far above $110,000 nor do you need to on here. Ditto on tax debt. You do need to make sure you and your parents understand how much college costs these days.
CUNY/SUNY will be your best options for safeties. I would pick more than one to apply to.
It’s all about GPA which is more important than test scores. I’m not putting USC in same tier as Penn in general. I’m saying it’s a high reach for a 3.55
The 31% with 4.0’s were likely all in rigorous schedules.
If I erred, then Emory, Rice, and WUSTL are also high reach. I’m not as familiar with them because D didn’t consider them.