Demographics: East Asian Male, Upper Middle-Class ~250k, Bay Area, VERY Competitive Public High School
Academics:
3.94 UW GPA 4.2 WGPA (4.41 if you count this semester as all As, but my school made this semester pass/fail) (This is top 10 maybe 5% for my school ~ no class rank due to pressure)
Have taken 5 APs thus far (including this year), planning on taking 5 more next year
1540 SAT (800M 740 r/W 17 on Essay)
Subject Tests: 780 Math II, planning on taking physics if more SATs get administrated
hope my AIME qualification makes up for this low Math 2 Score
PSAT: 1480 (223 Selection Score)
Relevant Coursework:
9 - Honors Bio, Honors Geo
10 - Honors Trig/Alg2, AP Computer Science (5)
11 - Honors Pre-Calc, AP Statistics, AP Chinese, AP US History, AP Physics 1
12 (planning to take) - AP Calculus BC, AP Physics C (Mech / E&M), AP Economics (Micro/Macro), AP Literature, AP Music Theory
Extracurriculars:
Founder and president of Entrepreneurship Club
Vice President of Business Club (Compete in DECA / FBLA)
Vice President of TSA TEAMS club
Secretary of Nutrition / Fitness Club
Founder of Startup (No profits, but developed software/hardware and testing in school, getting rec from the teacher who I'm testing in) - plan to talk about this on common app
Produce 'Beats', have coded a website for myself to sell beats on, generated around 4 figures.
Developing Passion Projects using R, Java, Python revolving around Economics / - Business Analytics
Powerlifting (Haven't competed yet but planning to, I have a total/score that can qualify me for nationals)
Summer Activities
9th - Not much, attended google ‘internship’ where we learned about various engineering topics - also attended non-well-known math program
10th - Used connections with google ‘internship’ to develop startup / product with friend mentioned above that I am now testing as a TA in my classes
Also attended COSMOS for EE
11th - Accepted into UCSC SIP for EE, I don’t know if it’s going to run though.
Awards and Honors:
United States Computing Olympiad (USACO) Gold Division Competitor
American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) Qualifier
TSA Teams National QUalifier
DECA State Finalist
National Merit Semifinalist (Projected at least but I think 223 should get me there)
Is there anything else that can be done (especially with this corona situation) that can help my chances at M&T ED / M.E.T or Business / EECS at T5 Schools?
Your AIME and ASCO will really help, your demographics and location will really hurt. But I think you’ll do fine wrt admissions. Where else are you applying outside of Penn and UCB?
@qhql2020 im mostly thinking of applying Eecs to most other places, as i’m trying to do quant/ business analytics/ VC once i finish college. Any ideas?
your AIME will for sure make up for the math 2, and the fact that testing was available because of the covid situation probably means that schools will waive the subject tests.
@theloniusmonk im mostly thinking of applying Eecs to most other places, as i’m trying to do quant/ business analytics/ VC once i finish college. Any ideas?
Hi @LilPaloAlto I’m a 2020 M&T (just had our virtual graduation).
You sound like a cool person. I think you’ve got some cool interests that are pretty unique (I don’t think there’s a powerlifter M&T as far as I know). I also really think your beats app sounds cool. Would you be interested in sharing the link?
I think it could be definitely worth talking about how these things are real deep passions of yours. A potential discussion could be how you learned perseverance or the importance of how understanding something deeply (ex technique) has an outsized impact on your output and progress. Maybe tie that into music theory.
I think a cool essay topic related to this startup idea is you working thru a sort of collaborative design-thinking process and testing it with a set of target customers. You might take away some interesting tips from Ash Maurya’s Running Lean. I thought the way he interviewed customers was insightful.
Another perhaps interesting lens is linking your other interests with business analytics / data science. If you truly think about things in this way, it could be interesting talking about how you actually think about finding principal components in datasets, find trends etc. It could be cool if someone discussed how their non- biz and tech interests actually tie in that way.
Fun fact: We have (at least 3) former DECA state officers between M&T 2020 and 2021 (including me). I’ll be honest, I don’t think being a state finalist is particularly impressive. You have more impressive and interesting things to talk about as discussed above.
If you’re interested in working on some cool projects over the summer to strengthen your tech and data science experiences you might enjoy summer.inventxyz.com/ that I’ve been developing as part of my edtech startup.