Your shot for Wake Forest, Tulane, and Emory is not nonexistent. You do have a shot, but it’s a very long shot. Your 3.55UW GPA is a potential issue that may be alleviated depending on what your school profile indicates (the school profile is sent by the counselor and will indicate typical GPAs and roughly how each GPA ranks within the class). If your school is known as lacking grade inflation, then that could help. The AP scores from your freshmen year don’t help your cause. But, the biggest reason why I think your chances are low are because of the admission rates (source):
- Emory: has a 13% overall acceptance rate, with ED 26% and RD 12%
- Tulane: has a 10% overall acceptance rate, with ED 31%, EA 12%, RD 8%. If you’re not applying ED here, your chances just became 3x harder.
- Wake Forest: 25% overall acceptance rate
Perhaps you think of the applicant pool to these schools as similar to your high school, with students running the gamut for exceptional to lackluster, and so if you’re in the 10-25% of your class, you’re likely to be in the top 10-25% of applicants to these schools. That’s not how it works, however. The vast majority of applicants are going to have very competitive profiles…if they don’t think they have good odds of being accepted, then they generally won’t apply. And of those really competitive applicants, these schools are taking 10-25% of them, and leaving the rest without an offer of admission. Take a look at some of the threads for the schools you’re interested to see who was getting admitted, deferred, waitlisted, or rejected. These are not students with a 2.0 GPA and 23 ACT. These threads may be helpful for you:
So if these are your top schools, that’s fine. But realize that they’re reaches and that you should have schools on your list where you are much likelier to receive an acceptance.