Chance Me: Computer Science at Competitive Schools: CMU, Berkeley, Cornell, Duke

Chance Me / Match Me!
1

Currently waiting for decisions to roll in and I wanted another perspective before I get my hopes up to high. :expressionless:

Bio:
-Citizenship: USA
-State of residence: FL
-Class: Low Income
-Race: 1st Gen African American
-Gender: Male
-Intended Major: Comp Sci

School:
-Type (Public/private & size): Public ~2000 in total, 409 in class.
-Graduates (How many go to Ivy’s/top 20): ~2 or 3
-AP’s Offered: 27

Academic Profile:
-Unweighted GPA: 3.6(out of 4.0)
-Weighted GPA: 4.24(out of 5.0)
-AP’s:
Freshman: Environmental(4),
Sophomore: Euro(4), Art History(3),
Junior: Lang(3), Calc AB(2), Bio(3), Stat(4), Psych(5), US Hist(5),
Senior: Calc BC(), Physics C(), Gov(), Lit()
-SAT: 1470
-Rank: 69/409
-Course Rigor: Almost all APs junior and senior year + Dual Enrollment in senior year

EC (In order of importance/commitment):
-Coding Club (President/Founder)
-Quiz Bowl (VP)
-Mu Alpha Theta
-Model UN(VP)
-Volunteered at nonprofit to teach kids how to code

Other Notables (College courses you’ve taken, papers published, created own website, TAing a class, ect):
-Intro to UNIX Programming(Dual Enrollment), Web Programming and Design(Dual Enrollment)
-Organized 1st high school competitive programming competition in region
-Created a small scale programming language at FSU Hackathon

Honors:
Best Newcomer Team at FSU Hackathon
Ron Brown Scholarship Competition Semi-Finalist
Udacity Grow With Google Scholarship
Quest Bridge Prep Scholar
FSU ACM Programming Contest 6th Place Team
FAMAT Computer Programming Competition 21st Place Team
AP Scholar with Distinction
Numerous Team Quiz Bowl Awards

Schools I’m looking at:
CMU, Berkeley, Cornell, Princeton, Duke, and UCF

2

Cal is going to be prohibitively expensive for OOS with a cost of 60,000 a year. And if you are planning to take CS in the School of Engineering, your GPA/standardized test scores are low. Also by law UCs are not allowed to take ethnicity into account.

All except UCF will be high reaches. CMU’s acceptance rate for CompSci is on a par with Ivy League schools.

You don’t obviously need to report AP scores, but a 2 on Calc AB for a potential Computer Science major is going to be a red flag, especially once you get into higher level math classes (Differential Equations, Discrete Math, Linear Algebra).

3

I was accepted to Cornell as a first-generation African American student with only a slightly better GPA and test scores, but less extracurriculars . Based on this fact, I would say you have a chance at Cornell and Berkeley if you applied to the College of Letters and Science/College of Arts and Sciences. Not too sure about the other schools.