I’m crossposting this from reddit, and I’m curious to hear what CC has to say about it. Please be as real as possible!!
Demographics: Chinese female from NJ; goes to a magnet school with a focus on engineering; ~70 kids per grade
Intended Major: Chemistry or Biomedical Eng (not definite yet)
Tests: 1560 SAT (760 EBRW, 800 Math), 800 Math II, 800 Chem
GPA: 97.99 UW, no weighted (might go up might go down but not significantly)
Rank: top 10% (not official, unsure of exact rank, could be anywhere from #1 - #7)
Coursework: 9 - AP Chinese (outside of school, 5); Rutgers Intro to Microecon (3 credits, earned an A)
10 - AP Calc AB (5), AP Chem (5)
11 - AP Bio, AP Physics C: Mech, AP Spanish Lang, AP Calc BC
we don’t have honors classes because they assume “all classes are of honor caliber” so everything else is standard to my school’s system
Awards: NHS, Honor Roll, AP Scholar, National Merit Semifinalist (projected - 1510 PSAT), AIME qualifier, ARML qualifier (through CJML), AMTNJ Math Contest 3rd Place, 2 state level SciOly awards (3rd / 6th), 2 regional FBLA awards, some regional bridge awards (see ECs), in school awards (honor roll, student of the month, math league stuff, physics club stuff, etc)
ECs:
I play Contract Bridge, the card game, and I have gotten some youth and open regional awards, as well as one national youth award for the game. I also led a team to compete for spot to represent the USA internationally (we did not qualify though), and I run a bridge class for kids at my local Chinese School. However, I don’t know how great of an EC this is. I don’t play bridge for the sake of college, but I’d be interested to know its worth. I know bridge is not that well known, but a few of the colleges I plan to apply to have bridge clubs/teams. Will this carry any weight?
Other ECs:
- Math League (I’m co-captain and will continue to be in senior year)
- Physics Team (I’m co-VP and will be co-pres senior year)
- FBLA
- Student Gov (will be treasurer senior year)
- Science Olympiad (will be co-pres senior year)
- Teacher’s Assistant at my local Chinese school
- volunteer with Jersey Cares
- went to Haiti with a youth group to volunteer (also organized a donation drive for kids in Haiti, raised ~$700 worth of gifts in my school of < 300 kids)
- Columbia’s SHP.
- take guitar lessons at my local music studio
- work as a studio assistant (unpaid) when local artists come to record their music at the studio
- started a Charity Board there to get students more involved in community service.
- Over the summer I’ve done CTY and Cooper Union’s Summer STEM program.
Essays/LORs/Other:
I can’t speak for any of these definitively right now, being a junior, but I think my LOR from my calc teacher (for both AB and BC) will be strong, while my counselor LOR and English teacher’s LOR will be decent but possibly template-esque. My essays hopefully will be decent because I’m starting brainstorming now and will work on them for very long, but I don’t think I’m that great of a writer.
Schools: I plan to REA Princeton and EA Rutgers (as my main safety) and some other state schools (Georgia Tech, UMich, UNC, etc). In the RD round, I’m looking into possibly Tufts, Vanderbilt, JHU, Brown, Duke, Harvard, Swarthmore, and Yale (I definitely want more matches and safeties though).
Please suggest some matches and safeties to look into (especially matches with > 20% acceptance rates) and let me know if I’m overestimating my stats!!! Any other advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks 