Chance a junior for MIT, Stanford, Harvard and more

Chance Me / Match Me!
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School: competitive NY public school (ranked top 200, typically sends ~5-10 kids to T10)
Area of Interest: Computational Biology

Academics:

  • GPA: 4.5/4.6 UW (4.6 = A+, 4.0 = A, everything else is same), 4.95W

  • Rank: not given, but I am in cum laude (top 10%), and most likely between rank 3-5/200

  • AP Courses (taken or taking): APWH (5), APCSA, APUSH, AP Bio, AP Physics (1+2), APES

  • Senior Course load: AP Physics C (EM+Mech), AP Calc BC, AP Euro, AP Stats

  • SAT: 1540

ECs:

  • Research: Student Researcher at UMICH researching ML cancer diagnostics. Submitting paper to biology and cs journals in a few months. Also submitting to Regeneron STS, and other similar competitions. Will include this as a research supplement for MIT

  • Math Team (Captain starting 12th): School competes in county and state level math leagues. Scored highly on this years competition series, 1st in county 4th in NY state. Representing my county at upcoming state meet. AIME qualifier (scored a 6)

  • Trivia Team (Captain 11th, 12th): We compete in monthly regional team trivia events, and have qualified for state and national competitions each year. In total, we won 6 regional tournaments, and won nationals my fresh yr.

  • Piano: Played Piano for 10 yrs at a conservatory. Served in church choir playing keyboard. RCM level 7

  • Science Olympiad (Captain starting 12th): Science competition modeled off of Olympics. Includes both building and theoretical events. We do well at regional competitions and qualified for states multiple times. Personally won 6 regional medals, 3 state medals (best individual performance in school)

  • Columbia SHP: Prestigious science enrichment program offered by Columbia program. Under 15% acc. rate, free tuition, and feeder into both college and SEAS. Took courses in Data Structures/Algos, and Bioinformatics so far.

  • Schoolhouse world tutor: Certified tutor for high school math and CS. Holding weekly tutoring sessions, will rack up around 200 hrs by application season.

  • Technology Club : Weekly meeting between school tech enthusiasts to work on projects together. Some projects I worked on:
    - Machine Learning model to detect exoplanets in NASA flux curve datasets
    - An algorithm to play Wordle
    - A CNN to identify cancer in MRI scans with 95% accuracy
    - Creating an online version of a baseball probabilities game played at our middle school,
    used to teach kids statistics.
    For my MIT app, I’m looking to bundle these together into a maker portfolio, along with a major project I am working on this summer

  • Soccer: Played Soccer for 8yrs as left mid/striker. Was very competitive, making it to a top travel team in state, known feeder into NYCFC academy. Became less of a focus due to injuries + focusing more on school. Ended up stopping this year due to bad injury.

Summer Activities (activities exclusively done in summer, I carry many activities like research throughout entire year):

  • Data Science internship at startup (12th)

  • AwesomeMath Summer Program (9th)

  • InspritAI ambassador (11th) - Made some more ML projects, and wrote a few blog posts on tech

LOR (granted these haven’t been written yet, but I’ve already spoke with these people and know generally what they can say)

  • Math/CS teacher: I’m the top student she’s had for several yrs, TA’ing for comp sci, and had a lot of fun convos about chess, CS, and dinosaurs outside of classroom. Definitely a few good stories to share.**

  • History Teacher/Trivia Team advisor: I was one of his fav. students, and he knows me throughout my high school career. Also had plenty of good conversations about current events outside of classroom. I play a big role in our trivia team so he can talk about that as well.

  • Research mentor: He’ll be able to give more validation on what I did at his lab and how I contributed meaningfully. Hopefully will show I have some good technical skills and show my research isn’t fluff.

Schools:

  • Safeties: RPI, SBU, Binghamton
  • Matches: BU, Amherst
  • Low Reach: GTech, UIUC, Cornell
  • High Reach: MIT, Stanford, Harvard, CMU SCS, Columbia, Yale

Note: I am also applying to UMich, but exempting from discussion. I’m virtually guaranteed to get in bc my research and other stuff, can’t fully explain without sharing personal details

I encourage you to be brutally honest! I am not afraid of rejection and I will be very happy going to UMich and continuing my research. Just looking to see what else is possible.

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This is all great. You need a coherent narrative that ties all these things together, ideally consistent with what your GC will write about you. Separately, you need to show your personality in your essays. Then some subset of your high reaches can happen. At this point it is mostly the soft factors that are at play. Don’t be afraid to drop some things (from listing) if they get in the way of the narrative. And the main essay should not be about academic stuff …

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First off, what is your budget? Has your family run the NFC calculators to see what the college(s) think the parents will be able to contribute? If so, are they willing and able to pay this amount? If so, then the applications to schools that meet 100% of need should be fine or if your family is full pay (and make sure they realize full pay is now about $80k a year at most of the schools you’re looking at). If the price that universities think your family should be able to pay does not work within the family budget, you will need to seek out merit aid, and most of your schools do not offer that.

As far as your chances, from the information you shared here you stand as good a chance as anyone into getting into the most selective universities in the U.S. Unfortunately, however, there are way more qualified students than there are seats at these universities. Thus, 95% of the people that do not get acceptance letters were just as qualified as the people who got the acceptance letters. So you have a chance, but it’s not probable for anyone to get into the universities on your list.

For a computational biology major, how many of the universities have that area of study within the computer sciences department vs. its own separate department/major? For instance, I just looked at UIUC and it looks as though you’d be looking at the Computer Science & Animal Sciences major or Computer Science & Crop Sciences major. Is that correct? If UIUC (and other colleges you’re interested in) have it as a separate major for direct admit, then I would assume your chances are better than those who are just applying for CS. But if there’s a strong correlation between a computational biology major and CS, then a school like UIUC for CS is about as difficult as what you’ve termed your “High Reach” schools.

Also, if you take a look at the GA Tech admissions thread, there are people with your stats who are being denied. It is definitely a challenge to get in as an out-of-state student. Also, make sure that you show your interest at all the universities, particularly universities that tend to feel like “safeties” for the HYPs of the world.

If I were to sort your list, this is how I would categorize it.

Likely
• RPI
• Binghamton
• Stony Brook

Possible
• BU

Less Likely
• Amherst
• Cornell
• Georgia Tech
• UIUC
• MIT
• Stanford
• Harvard
• Columbia
• Yale
• Carnegie Mellon SCS

(Edited to change Carnegie Mellon SCS’ category and to remove my question.)

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s/he means cmu scs.

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CMU SCS is a less likely. Look at their admit stats…

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How did you develop your list of schools? Several of them didn’t show up as offering any degrees in computational biology, and some of them were only in grad school, not for undergrad. Here are some other colleges you may want to consider. These all have undergrad degrees in computational biology except for U. of Pittsburgh, but that one offers a PhD in computational biology, so I imagine there are definitely possibilities for you there.

Likely

  • U. of Delaware
  • U. of Pittsburgh

Possible

  • Case Western
  • Virginia Tech
  • Florida State

Less Likely

  • Brown
  • Colby
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Kids that claim to go into computational biology just go into CS :-). The strongest CS schools are the strongest comp bio schools. You should just treat him/her as a CS aspirant. You don’t pick U Delaware over any of the upper reaches listed just because U delaware has a comp bio major and the other ones don’t

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Computational Biology is my interest, not necessarily my intended major. What I mean is that I am interested in applying computation to biological problems. There are many paths to it, including plain CS degrees, bioinformatics, stats, applied math.

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Now that I realize that OP was referring to CS at Carnegie Mellon, I agree that it should be categorized as less likely. For overall Carnegie Mellon I was debating between less likely and possible, but with it as CS, definitely less likely.

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Appreciate the clarification, but I was also trying to give OP some likelier options to consider. Henceforth I will not necessarily limit the search to computational biology.

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Honestly there is another grouping within the less likely bucket. The publics and maybe Amherst are a little easier than the rest of the less likely bucket. And Yale shouldn’t belong in the OP’s CS list as it probably has the weakest CS department of the lot, apart from Amherst.

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People are welcome to sort the colleges into categories as they see fit; my list is just one user’s opinion. The OP would probably benefit from a variety of perspectives.

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How did you develop your own list of colleges to apply to? Obviously limiting yourself to schools offering computational biology majors wasn’t it. :blush: Amherst seems a bit like an outlier as does Stanford, the only university west of the Mississippi River. I’d love to hear your thinking behind the development of your list.

In case you’re looking for other options (as I interpreted your “Just looking to see what else is possible,”) these are colleges with strength in CS, applied math, bioinformatics, etc. Several of them were selected not only for their academic strengths, but also the rich research opportunities at the college themselves as well as in their general environs.

Likely

Possible

  • NC State
  • U. of Georgia
  • U. of Minnesota
  • U. of Rochester
  • U. of Wisconsin

Less Likely

  • Duke
  • Johns Hopkins
  • UNC – Chapel Hill
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Thanks for the suggestions. I can give some rationale for the more peculiar schools on my list.

Safeties: All pretty close to home, with top100 CS. Stony and Bing are affordable instate and their may be potential for scholarships

Amherst: Although their CS program might not be the same caliber as the other schools on my list, they have strong presence in AI, which is a major interest for me. Also, Amherst has a lot of research programs in general, and great location.

Yale: Some of the major reasons need to be kept private - but all in all I feel like I have a much better chance at Yale than other schools of similar caliber. Great location as well and have a friend who goes there as a CS major.

Stanford: So I would prefer to stay east coast, but Stanford is such an elite school and I have to at least give it a shot. Obviously amazing CS program, and very strong life sciences. Entrepreneurial culture which I think I will enjoy. Being near silicon valley opens a lot of opportunities in big tech, and startups (working for others, and building my own).

Since I have such a great opportunity at UMich, I’m not interested in adding most of the schools on the “possible” list. Wisconsin, however, is a good fit, I will strongly consider adding. JHU is also a fine school.

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Carnegie Mellon is a reach for anyone and everyone.

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You are a strong candidate, and should be proud of your accomplishments. There are schools that are reaches for everyone simply because of their statistics. IMO Amherst falls into that category. Your original list did look sufficiently diverse and although it would be foolish to advise any OOS that UMich could be treated as anything but a reach (there is a question of yield protection discussed on other threads), sounds like you might have more secure chances there than most. If you can, “get it in writing” from your source.

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Not everyone. For example, if you’re an IMO medalist and you apply ED, you’re a shoo-in at CMU (even to its most selective school SCS).

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I think your high reach and low reach schools are just that…high and low reaches. I would add Amherst to that list as well. I think it’s more of a reach than a match due to low acceptance rate.

Are your sure these schools affordable?

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Amherst is a low reach, not a match - and I’d put Cornell as a high reach. Otherwise it looks like you have categorized your schools well. If you are planning on majoring in CS, I’m not sure why Harvard or Yale besides the prestige factor. I don’t believe they are among the better programs for CS, but perhaps the possible connections etc. supersedes that consideration for you. As I’m sure you know, all of the elite schools on your list are unlikely for all students and a “no” is more likely than a yes but it’s worth throwing your hat in the ring - you have a great background. Best of luck.

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For a CS kid CMU is probably still easier than MIT, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, and maybe even Cornell. Despite the rankings. CMUs CS yield is also very low – not just the general university yield.

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