I am currently a junior. I would like to know my chances for: UPenn, Brown, NYU, Barnard, and USC (communications/journalism/english major)
GPA: 4.75 (weighted) 4.0 (unweighted)
SAT: 1520
SAT Subjects: Taking literature and math 1 soon
Course Load: Have taken all advanced classes at my school. IB diploma candidate. School only offers a few AP classes. WHAP (4), Human Geography (4)
Extracurriculars:
-Very involved in my youth group. Held various board positions including chapter president
-National Honor Society Treasurer
-Jewish Student Union President
-Hebrew School teacher’s assistant
-Writer for food blog website
-Recreational field hockey team
-NYU summer career exploration program
-Summer intern for a local lifestyle magazine
About Me:
White, jewish, middle class, female
Attends a very large Texas high school
Always have chance. Little light on APs. You don’t need 12 APs but 5 or 6 is better than 2 unless it is not available in your HS.What makes your W GPA 4.75 if you only have 2AP? Why not taking SAT subject Math 2? This makes me think your courses are not rigorous. At least on Math and Science. You don’t even have English AP in junior. On Social Science, did you take rigorous courses? What is your class rank? without all the info, your chance is less than 50%. Hope you are not offended.
It’s not uncommon for IB kids to have fewer AP. (Some IB hs have few AP or policies that limit them for IB kids.) And what matters is the unweighted. Between IB and “all advanced classes,” I think we can assume rigor. It’s ok to take math1.
But it takes more than that. OP, are NHS and JSU the only activities in the hs? No newspaper, lit journal, etc? Any community engagement besides the one summer “lifestyle” magazine work?
You need to carefully check those colleges have a comms/journalism major. And read up on what those schools look for.
You need to find out if your parents can afford these schools. If not, you’re wasting your time, even if you get accepted. All of these schools have a 10% or less admissions rate. This means if you use this as your college list, you have a greater than 90% chance of being rejected by all of them.
Cost comes before anything else. If you have to co-sign large amounts of debt to pay for a school, you can’t afford it in the first place. The debt will sabotage or even sink your career, especially when you decide to get married and start a family.
My school is an IB school, so I have taken IB classes and pre-IB (honors) classes. School offers 1 AP Freshman year and 1 Sophomore year. Junior and Senior is focused on IB. I will have the chance to take AP Calc after completing Math HL (IB) and I will be taking AP Gov as an elective during Senior year. Class rank is top 10 out of 800.
As a alum of an Ivy League school and a volunteer interviewer, I would say that your credentials do not stand out. Your academics are strong, but not remarkably so. Your EC’s are a melange of different activities without a clear theme and most of them entail joining an existing institution rather than you taking initiative to found something or start something substantive. Your EC’s also don’t show significant contribution to society or creativity. Your competition will be very formidable. You should consider the Ivies and Stanford to be far reach schools…which is the case for just about everyone unless you are a recruited athlete or have other strong hooks.
Better to work with an existing organization than “found,” start from scratch, and hope to get rolling. Working with existing groups means adapting to their expecttions, usually alongside adults.
Youth group is fine, as is the internship (as a start.) For comms/journalism, the idea would be some school ECs in those fields, not just writing a food blog or the lifestyle work. Not just assisting a teacher. Depth and breadth. Because of the fierce competition, you have to stretch more.
The only colleges with a comms major are Penn and Cornell. I don’t think any Ivy has an undergrad journalism major.