Senior Year Course Load: 7APs, but the other 2 classes are CS related
Standardized Testing
SAT I: 1580(800 EBRW, 780 M)
PSAT: 1450(740 EBRW, 710 M)
ACT: N/A
AP: 5 5s and 5 4s
Extracurriculars/Activities
National lead of actually legitimate international nonprofit
MIT summer program w/ research (not RSI)
co-founded organization for early STEAM education + coding - impacted over 300 underprivileged kids in our area, we focus outreach events to title 1 schools in our area - have 8 chapters across the US
FRC team (did a lot on the business side, raised a bunch of money and got more girls to join, have leadership for that aspect)
Girls who code summer immersion program
CS Club president - actually did stuff here, the club grew from 10 to 40 members, and we learned a bunch of programming languages
NAHS VP
Debate president - increased club membership, made debate accessible to more ppl at my school by removing the requirement to be in the class to compete
teach at religious school (150+ hours over 2 years) - pioneered the program that lets students become teachers after completing the curriculum
youth volunteering lead for a cultural community organization (organized a large food drive project, 350+ participants)
Awards/Honors
AP Scholar with distinction
some random small coding competitions
state BPA award
1st degree Black Belt
Random Debate Comps
BPA Natl. Ambassador Award - a lot of ppl get this even tho its natl.
NHS?
Colleges
Cornell
MIT
Caltech
UC Berkeley
UCLA
Carnegie Melon
Stanford
GA Tech
UT Austin
and safeties
please let me know if you think I can get into any of these
Absolutely, you may be admitted to a university with extremely low acceptance rate. But, impossible for me to say.
You have excellent accomplishments.
For UT Austin, are you in top 6% of your class per the auto admit policy?
Congratulations on your achievements! You have as good a chance as any other well qualified applicant but it’s hard to accurately chance, because these are all so unpredictable for high-stat students like you. I think your chances are higher at schools that are a bit more stats focused like Caltech and CMU. So if either is a top choice for you, I strongly recommend applying REA (to Caltech) or ED (to CMU). But be mindful these are both “fit” schools and aren’t the right choice for everybody. Do your research.
UCB and UCLA are going to be hard because they’ve lowered the cap on how many OOS students they can accept. OOS is hard at GaTech too.
Agree that ED to a T10 or T20 or to CMU, or REA to Caltech is a way to increase chance of admission.
Difficulty is in discerning which private T20 is best fit/ essays, institutional priorities.
@Nikita.a18 have you toured / even virtually any T20 unis on your list?
The experience will be quite variable between those schools. You should put in a little more work to decide if you want an extremely focused technical experience like MIT, Caltech and CMU, or more of a “typical college experience,” like Stanford, UT and UCB. There’s nothing wrong with the latter. A CS degree from any of them will set you up nicely.
Both do have substantial humanities and social science general education requirements.
Of the colleges on your list the minimum academic intensity overall (based on general education requirements) is highest at Caltech, followed by MIT, followed by probably everything else.
If this is what I think it is, you have a decent chance at MIT and CalTech. Anecdotally, admission to CalTech seems to improve if you visit. You have an even better shot of ED at Cornell and CMU.
The question to me is, what is your first choice?
Separately, note that your chances of admission are not going to improve with more APs. Lots of kids get into these schools with only 7 or 8 APs. So don’t take all these AP courses for that reason.
Congratulations on being an extremely accomplished and competitive applicant. UC’s offer little to no financial aid (need or merit based) so make sure $67K/year to attend is within you and your family’s budget.
UCLA and UCB have capped their OOS admit rates. Last year Fall 2022, the OOS UCB admit rate was 8.6% and UCLA’s was 8.8%.
CS is probably one of the most competitive majors at the UC’s. UCB’s admit rate for Fall 2022 CS in the College of L&S was 2.9%
For UCB’s EECS major, the admit rate was 4.5%.
UCLA’s 2021 admit rate for CS (2022 data not yet available) was 8.3%.
Consider both schools as Reaches but still possible.
Congratulations on all of your accomplishments while you’ve been in high school! You will be a strong candidate for any school in the country, though that is no guarantee of acceptance as there are far more highly-qualified candidates than there are spots. I would suspect, however, that your odds are certainly better than the overall admissions rates.
As others have mentioned, the experiences at each of the schools on your list will be quite different. Have you visited any of them? Have you done any college visits? Those can help give you a sense of what you want out of your college experience and to distinguish between all of these excellent schools.
UT-Dallas might be a safety, but it’s got a strong CS program and has been heavily recruiting National Merit Finalists.
In Canada, U. of Toronto, U. of Waterloo, U. of British Columbia, or McGill. The universities in Canada are much more stats-focused, so your odds for admission is fairly likely, I believe.
Purdue (IN)
Rutgers (NJ)
U. of Virginia
Virginia Tech
Cal Poly - San Luis Obispo
Harvey Mudd…a low admit rate…but I think you have definite potential of getting in.
Good luck on your applications! For Computer Science I would add University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Very strong program but not an easy admit.
You mention safeties, which schools are you considering safeties? Computer Science is a very popular major and getting more and more popular by the minute. Make sure you have true safeties.
CMU has a policy of gender parity for it’s STEM majors; they want half of each class to be women, regardless of the number of male and female applicants. Because so many more men apply for that CompSci than women, your chances for admission are much higher than their overall acceptance for that major (around 6%, I think).
On a different note, why isn’t UIUC on your list? It is ranked higher for CompSci than UT Austin, CalTech and UCLA, and the school’s acceptance rate is much higher than that of some other schools on your list.
ps You seem like quite the overachiever, and you will excel where ever you land.
I second that for CMU. They are sick of being the safety for MIT, Stanford and CalTech, so they give a strong preference to students who commit via ED.
If you would be interested in a smaller school, check out Harvey Mudd College. Well, it actually has just as many undergraduates as Caltech, so not really “smaller”.
As others have said - you are competitive for any of these, unfortunately, they can only accept 20% or so of their competitive applicants.
I agree with other posters that the UCs and GTech are really not the best choice. Berkeley especially, since they have been over enrolling pretty consistently these past years.
However, what are you looking for in a college? As others have also written - these are very different colleges, and you really want to find a place where you will thrive.
In any case, congratulations on all of your great achievements.
You’ve done really well, and you have a lot to be proud of, no matter where you end up!
Why? Not that there’s anything wrong with them. The complete list represents a pretty eclectic group of experiences though. If you’re vetting by reputation and rank alone, you could end up disappointed. Posters every year show up enquiring about transferring out of prestigious schools they didn’t vet properly.