Hi, I’m an international student from Brazil, and I applied to 15 US colleges - most of which have admissions rates lower than 15%. I’m really anxious about my results, especially because studying abroad is my dream, so I’ll be really grateful if anyone can help.
This is the list of colleges I applied to:
Columbia (6%)
Harvard (5%)
Yale (6%)
UPenn (8%)
Dartmouth (8%)
Cornell (11%)
UChicago (6%)
Northwestern (9%)
Duke (8%)
NYU (16%)
UC - Berkeley (16%)
Carnegie Mellon University (15%)
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor (23%)
UNC-Chapel Hill (23%)
Boston College (27%)
Out of these, I applied ED to Columbia (got deferred), EA to UMich (got deferred), and UNC (accepted). Also, UChigaco waitlisted me.
A little bit of background: I’m a white gay man from São Paulo, Brazil. My socioeconomic background is pretty good, which allowed me to apply without requesting financial aid from any university.
Tests: 1510 on the SAT (780 on math and 730 on English) and 770 on the SAT Subject Spanish test - I also took the math 2 one but didn’t do well (got 700), so I didn’t send this score. I also got a 110/120 on the TOEFL IBT.
Awards: National silver medal at the Mathemátiques sans Frontières olympiad (2019). National gold medal at the Brazilian Astronomy and Astronautics Olympiad (2020).
School Report: mainly 9,5s on a scale from 0 to 10 - which is quite above average for Brazilian schools (my school didn’t have a rank, unfortunately).
As we cannot choose any electives nor AP classes in Brazil, I took all of the state-required subjects, which are: Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Portuguese, Portuguese Writing, Literature, History, Geography, English, Philosophy, and Sociology. I also had Spanish classes as part of my curriculum.
Languages: Portuguese, English, Spanish, and Mandarin (extracurricular).
Recommendation Letters: I sent two teacher recommendation letters (which were pretty good, I think) and a Counselor recommendation letter (which was also quite good and really talked about how I impacted my school’s community). I didn’t send a peer recommendation letter to Dartmouth, which worries me a little.
Extracurriculars:
School’s official Volleyball team (member for 4 years, until 12th grade).
Scientific initiation Group - developed two projects from 2016-2018
2.1 Analysis of and possible improvements to the Brazilian School system (2017)
2.2 Low-cost flood detector (project and prototype presented at a TedX in 2018)
Community service projects (the main one was the Andoriar project, through which I went to several states in Brazil and helped build the necessary infrastructure for low-income communities).
Piano Classes (since 2016, I wrote my common app essay about the piano btw).
Founded my school’s academic support group in 2018 (and helped people with difficulties on several subjects, from math to sociology).
Founded and led my School’s Gender Studies Group (2020)
Helped found my School’s Social Entrepreneurship Club (2020)
Founded a non-profit organization to help low-income Brazilian students with their academic difficulties and to combat educational inequality (2020).
Several research projects during high school, including a seminar on extreme social inequality and its impacts on economic growth, a documentary on 20th-century Chinese economic development, a paper contrasting the absolute and transcendental idealisms, etc…
My intended major is economics.
Also, I got interviews from Columbia, Yale, UPenn, Dartmouth, and CMU. I didn’t get, though, from Harvard, Duke, and Northwestern (are there any chances I’ll get into the last three??).
So, the question is: do I really have chances of getting into any of my reaches, or should I prepare to get rejected from almost all of them?
Thank you very very much for reading everything and answering; it will really help me prepare for the decisions, haha.