Chance a girl interested in both humanities and stem for T20s

Demographics

  • Gender: Female

  • Race/Ethnicity: White

  • Residence: CA, Bay Area

  • Income Bracket: about $100k

  • Type of School: medium public, competitive

  • Other special factors: first-gen, woman in stem?

Intended Major(s): mechanical engineering and english (double major)

Academics

  • GPA (UW/W): 3.9 UW (school doesn’t do weighted)

  • Rank (or percentile): no rank

  • Senior Year Course Load: will be most rigorous course load

Testing

  • SAT I: 1540 (780RW, 760M)

  • SAT II: N/A

  • AP/IB: school doesn’t offer AP or IB

Extracurriculars/Activities

  1. working part time as a cashier, all 4 years (takes up a lot of my time)

  2. taekwondo, about 8 years (not competitively though so no awards)

  3. research at a local community college on thermodynamics last summer, not published but got a stipend from the research program (not a well known program)

  4. volunteering at a non-profit to teach young kids how to code (since 10th grade)

  5. computer science club (since 9th), no leadership

  6. book club at school, just reading and discussing books (since 10th), no leadership

  7. doing a free program this summer related to machine learning

  8. girls who code SIP (summer after 9th grade)

  9. volunteered at a library from 9th to 10th grade (got cut short because of covid)

Awards/Honors

  1. presented research at a conference (not sure if this counts?)

  2. placed in some hackathons

  3. national merit semifinalist (hopefully? index score is well above previous years for my state but who knows with covid)

Letters of Recommendation

  1. english teacher (he likes me but probably won’t be amazing, 6-7/10?)

  2. math teacher (he likes me but probably won’t be amazing, 6-7/10?)

  3. rec from my taekwondo instructor, for schools that have an optional rec (she loves me, 8-9/10)

I’m mostly worried about my ECs (nothing exceptional for most of the kids applying to T20s I think) and lack of awards. hopefully I can write good essays

Schools: Ivies with the exception of Columbia and Dartmouth, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Rice, WashU. I have other matches and safeties but I don’t wanna get chanced for those.
**RD everywhere except MIT

Your odds are slim at all of them. No doubt that you are well accomplished. But every valedictorian or 36 ACT out there is applying to similar schoo”s.

Many of these schools are vastly different. Are you applying simply based on pedigree ? Do you know that you can afford them ??

With a 3.9 make sure to apply to schools lije Alabama, Arizona, Arizona State, South Carolina and Utah. You’d be amazed at how many similar students attend. They have strong Honors Colleges and merit aid abounds.

These would be ‘strong’ safeties.

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I ran the net price calc on all of these, and it’s definitely within the budget that my family and I can pay. And yes, I’m applying to good safeties and targets because I understand that these schools are incredibly difficult to get into.

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You might be most concerned about your ECs, but I would be pretty worried that the teachers you think will rate you the highest see you as just an average student. Anybody aspiring to the schools you want should have teachers who think that they are amazing. And, fwiw, it’s not about “liking” you- it’s about saying you are the kind of star student that tippy top schools are looking for, and backing it up with specifics.

I would also not assume that double majoring in mech e & english is going to happen: most programs will have some restrictions or application process. I understand not wanting to choose between engineering and english at this stage, so you might consider double majoring in physics or math + english for UG, and then doing a Masters for the engineering qualification. I do know somebody who died Mech E & English at Cornell, but it was very hard going.

I also think you need to do more research into the idea of double majoring in mechanical engineering and English. I was an engineer undergrad, and I know that I did not have enough free electives to pick up another completely unrelated major. Engineering majors have many required courses and don’t have the same amount freedom that a humanities major would have.

Why do you want to double major? If you want to be an engineer, adding another major in English isn’t going to help your career. You can take courses in English, if you want, without filling all the requirements of a major.

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English is good to diversify the technical aspect. My son’s GF is doing a minor. She enjoys English and to help her overall writing is why she’s doing.

That said if you major in engineering that is how you’ll find your job. So double majoring in English, unless really important to you personally, won’t help you obtain employment.

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I think you’d need more leadership and stronger recommendations. Grinnell and Harvey Mudd are need blind. SMU prides itself on double majors and you’d get merit, but like others said, it’s tough to double major in English and engineering.

I wonder about lack of APs. There may not be enough rigor in the curriculum for T20 colleges for mech engineering.
Maybe English or math could be better fit.

I’d agree - but I know on a chat I saw someone got into Rice with four because that’s what their school offered whereas others take ten but if the school offered 20+, it wasn’t seen as good.

I’m sure they’d love to see AP and/or Dual enrollment - but hopefully the OP won’t be penalized.

She doesn’t want to chance her match schools - but she should. Many a student on CC got rejected at their match school because they were over confident. Or misread. But we’ll honor her wishes.

Yes, I wonder if a T20 mech engineering program gets so many applicants with APs in math and science, that they could fill a class. Not having any could be lack of fit, though that is out of OP’s control. I wonder if the guidance counselor will provide class rank, since this opinion article suggests a student has a chance if in top five percent of class.

You should look into northeastern!!

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I think it’s going to be near impossible to double major in engineering and any liberal arts major. Engineering major sequences are intense and fill up the schedule quickly. I’m not even sure it’s allowed at some schools. Our niece at UIUC is in their business school and wanted to double major in a liberal arts discipline in their liberal arts college and was told that’s not possible.

This was also a complication for our son who liked all subjects. He didn’t want to major in engineering because he wanted to be able to take a good amount of non-stem classes and was unsure of his major. He’s double majoring in math and physics at a small liberal arts school yet still has almost half of his classes in non-stem subjects. That’s worked for him but he clearly won’t be an engineer at the end of these four years!

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As others have mentioned, getting accepted to any of the schools on your list is like winning the lottery regardless of how strong your application is.

However, you can tip the odds in your favor because you are female and engineering tends to attract more males. Colleges really want more women in engineering. RPI, a very good engineering university in NY, for example, has set a goal to balance their gender ratio at 50:50 by 2030. Currently it’s 2:1 males.

Just a quick look at your list, Rice, for example, is 64:36 male:female in engineering. I’d say your chances are good at Rice and they are very good with financial aid. You should qualify for a full tuition waiver there.

In doing your research, do the same gender analysis with each of the colleges you’re interested in. The ones that are heavily male are where you’ll have your best chance of admission. Ignore the overall gender balance at the college. Look specifically at their College of Engineering. If it’s not readily available, look for a recent graduating class and the list of degrees awarded. It’s often broken down by male:female. If you have trouble finding that information, re-post here for help.

Finally, I suggest that you expand your list to include some smaller colleges with engineering schools. They are often as good or better than the big name universities. I’m thinking specifically of schools like Harvey Mudd in California, Rose-Holman Institute in Indiana, and Bucknell University and Lafayette College, both in Pennsylvania.

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I want to go in mechanical engineering as a career and I wanted to do the english just because I really enjoy it. But I see through everyone’s comments that it would be very hard. I think I might minor it or like you suggested, just take courses in it.

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my school allows us to take dual-enrollment classes at a local college and more than half of my classes have been through there. Hopefully colleges understand that I couldn’t really control my school not having APs

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would you say it’s easier to double major in computer science and english? I’ve been looking into computer science as well. But looking through comments, I do see that mechanical engineering and english will be really hard so I might minor or just take elective courses

Thank you for the advice! I was seriously considering Harvey Mudd at one point but I would much prefer medium-large size schools. Or at least about 2000 students.

For recommendations, I was under the assumption (through reading online mostly) that they’re not as important as other aspects such as grades, ECs, essays and that as long as the teachers don’t say anything bad then it shouldn’t hurt our application? I’m sure my teachers will say a lot of good things but I don’t think they would rate me as a “top few” for any of the categories on the recommendation.

Depends on the uni. For the tippy-tops LoRs can make a significant difference. Imagine that you are reading apps for Harvard, which famously wants the best of the best. You read LoR after LoR of ‘this student is one of those rare students that only comes along a few times in a career, whose traits of X,Y,Z stand out head and shoulders above their peers, as in (example)(example)(example)’ - and then you come across one that reads ‘this is a strong student who does good work’ (which is what a 6-7/10 suggests). AOs at the super-selectives know that they have to reject 95% of the apps they read- and that is hard on a human level. Having any element of an app be just average make it easier for them.

tl;dr: Bluntly, if you don’t impress the teachers that you picked to tell the best possible story about you, why would Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc be impressed by you?

That makes sense, thanks!