I’m kinda surprised no one has posted here yet this year. Maybe I missed the memo.
Demographics
Gender: Male
Race/Ethnicity: Asian
Residence: Texas
Income Bracket: 200k+
Type of School: Large Competitive Public School
Hooks (Recruited Athlete, URM, First-Gen, Geographic, Legacy, etc.): None
Intended Major(s): Computer Science
Academics
GPA (UW): 4.0 (my school has a really strange way of doing weighted)
Rank (or percentile): 7.5%
Honors/AP/IB/Dual Enrollment/etc.: 14 APs
Senior Year Course Load: AP Calc BC, AP Lit, AP Physics C, AP Gov, AP Macro
Standardized Testing
SAT I: 1480 (710RW, 770M) (Went test optional for the most competitive schools)
AP/IB: Slightly more 5s than 4s
Extracurriculars/Activities
Built a crowdsourced recommender system – Pretty much my main CS passion project system for one summer. Algorithms used machine learning, natural language processing, and some statistics. Pretty good impact with around 10k users.
Research Articles – Published 6 research articles in data science magazines on topics ranging from social network analytics, recommender systems, sentiment analysis, computer vision, etc. (most of these were use cases and not theoretical so I would consider them low-impact).
Online Learning – Earned certificates in a bunch of courses from Coursera, MIT OCW, and edX, which gave me the knowledge to build my recommender system and optimize other projects.
Research Paper – Published a research paper in a well-known journal detailing the impact of modern recommender systems on the demand distribution and how companies/manufacturers must respond (this paper had a higher impact).
Robotics – Competed in both FTC and FRC for 4 years. Held a few leadership positions along the way and our team qualified for worlds a few times.
XC/Track – Ran varsity for 4 years, helped mentor a underprivileged team from a low-income area (one of the best experiences I’ve had in my life), and was named a Team Captain.
Rock Climbing – Nothing crazy here, won a few local competitions and helped maintain some local crags.
Awards/Honors
AP Scholar with Distinction
National Merit Commended Student
Cross Country Association All-Academic Team
Letters of Recommendation
Counselor 5/10 – She was always at “lunch meetings” and never interacted with students.
Physics 8/10 – She really liked me and I performed exceptionally well in her class. She was also one of those teachers who hung up banners from every college where her students attended, so she really cared about us going to good colleges.
Statistics 7/10 – Her English was a bit questionable lol, but I got a 5 on the AP exam and she loved me for that.
Interviews
Stanford – It was my first interview so I was a bit nervous, but we had a decent discussion. I was a bit thrown off because he kept walking around his house to get juice and do errands.
Northwestern – I liked this one. My interviewer had a son who was around my age and also in robotics, so we related quite a bit over that.
UPenn – Probably my favorite interview. He had just graduated from Penn, so the age difference wasn’t too much and we got into some deep discussions about my research and life in general.
Harvard – Compared to all my other interviews, it was the first time I didn’t really have to explain my research since my interviewer (who was a professor) picked up on it very quickly. In fact, he started hitting me with some tough questions that really forced me to dig deep and prove the value in my work.
Essays
5/10 – I’m not a prolific writer or anything, I just tried to reflect on my experiences and ECs in the best light possible. I also didn’t have a college counselor or essay consultant to review them.
Decisions (indicate ED/EA/REA/SCEA/RD)
Acceptances:
Texas A&M
UIUC (EA)
UC Berkeley (L&S which works better for me since I will probably double major in Econ)
USC
UT Austin (didn’t get my major and placed in undeclared)
Waitlists:
Carnegie Mellon University (RD)
Purdue (RD)
Georgia Tech (EA deferred to RD)
UMich (RD)
Rice (RD)
Cornell (RD)
Rejections:
Stanford (REA)
Northwestern (RD)
Duke (RD)
Dartmouth (RD)
Harvard (RD)
Columbia (RD)
UPenn (RD)
Additional Information:
All things considered, I’m incredibly grateful with these results, and after careful consideration, I committed to Berkeley earlier today. Go Bears! Still looking for roommates though, so feel free to message me.
Advice:
If you can afford a college counselor, get one. As much as I wish the college admission process could be a level play field for everyone, it’s not. It’s just so competitive nowadays that you need every advantage you can get. Fortunately, everything worked out for me, but I know that I could just as easily be sitting with only my guaranteed acceptance to A&M. Looking back, it would have been safer to get a college counselor.
If you are serious about state schools which have both an early and regular round, make sure you apply early to have the best shot. I learned that the hard way with Purdue and Michigan.
For any Texas Residents out there, being in the top 6% doesn’t guarantee you will get competitive majors like CS, engineering, or business at UT. I have so many friends from 4-6% who got placed in COLA as undeclared like I did, despite having pretty strong applications. If you want my honest opinion, to have a good shot at competitive majors nowadays, you need to be ranked somewhere closer to 3% or better.
Best of luck to next year’s applicants, hopefully it isn’t as crazy as this year was!
