I’m an applicant from a metropolitan city of India, applying this year to a bunch of colleges for computer science, but the ones I really want are Caltech, MIT and CMU. In particular, Caltech is my dream college, because I feel that it’s by far the best fit for me. I’ve applied EA to MIT. I was going to do Caltech EA too, but I decided my app cold improve for Caltech.
Male.
An IB student from a school that claims to be fairly prestigious;
No financial need as such.
Academics-
11th grade GPA- 3.95
Overall HS GPA- 3.86 (went down a bit because my 9th grade was meh. Also the weightage, or lack thereof, doesn’t work in my favour, since I did 10th grade in an Indian system school)
11th grade IB-
41/42 first semester, 40/42 second semester (math HL, Physics HL, Chem HL, Pych SL, English Lang & Lit SL, all 7s, with a 6 in Hindi SL, though I’m guessing tech colleges won’t really care about that)
A few academic awards at school here and there.
I’m preparing independently for the IB further math HL exam, which covers several college level topics (involves advanced stats, advanced calc, linear algebra, sets/relations/groups, geometry and discrete math), and is like an uber extension to the math HL course, I’ve been told only about 160 students in the world take this each year.
Class rank- in the top 4-5 out of 108 (our school doesn’t report ranks though)
SAT (not superscored)- 2350 (CR 770; math 800; W 780)
SAT subject tests- math 800; physics 800; chem 790
ECs-
-I’ve been going to national and international robotics competitions for 5 years now, I’ve won 4 international awards, and 2 of them were world championships.
-several MUNs, but most notably, co-founder and Charge d’Affaires for a conference projected to be India’s largest for-charity youth conference.
-Drawing and digital art; I’ve done a bunch of logo design work; I’m submitting a visual arts portfolio.
-I write and illustrate my own nerdy, science based webcomic (in the same vein as xkcd)
-Co-founder of the city’s first stand-up comedy club exclusively for teenagers.
-One of the Co-founders and Co-organizer of a free-of-cost STEM talent search competition thingy, in association with my robotics institute, where we gave out a few robotics scholarships.
-‘Speedcubing’ - Solving the Rubik’s cube and other similar puzzles as fast as possible. I’ve participated in a few competitions, and I also organized my own speed cubing competition.
-Independent research in Artificial Intelligence where I used knowledge from psychology to work with a friend and create a computer program that remembers and ‘learns’ like a human. (this is the part I though I could improve for Caltech because it isn’t published yet and I’d like to try to do that before regular apps)
-I’ve spoken at a youth innovation conference about AI and my research, in what was essentially a TED talk in content.
-CS/math Research under an IIT math prof.
-Took a coursera course in philosophy, just because it seemed interesting.
-I’m also currently working on starting an academic journal specifically for teenage researchers to try and break the stigma that research is something esoteric and distant that only certain people can do.
-Internships at a microfinance firm and a digital marketing firm.
Recs- Psych and Math teachers, should be good
Additional rec- Robotics teacher- she showed me after submitting it, is really good.