Chance me CS :)

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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Demographics: Male, Asian, and I go to a top 10 ranked (by USNews) high-school in the country (I won’t say the exact one for privacy reasons), the scattergrams on Naviance tell me like 80%+ of students around my GPA/SAT got accepted so there’s that

Intended Major(s): Computer Science

ACT/SAT/SAT II: 1560 SAT

UW/W GPA and Rank: 3.86 UW, 4.36 W post-junior year

Coursework:

Sophomore year: AP CS (5)

Junior year: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, (Both of these classes are post-AP classes so they are weighted 5.0), APUSH, AP Calc BC, AP Chem (at least a 4 on all 3 of these exams)

Senior year: Machine Learning, Multivariable Calc/Linear Algebra, (Both of these are post-AP), AP Physics C, AP Gov, AP Lang, Research Lab at my school

The rest of my classes are all honors except for like gym and stuff

Awards: Not a huge amount of awards, I’ve won a good amount hackathons, I’ve got USACO under my belt and I’m trying to get gold but that might not happen, I’ve got some Latin awards, I’m also looking to do a good amount Kaggle over the summer (idk if this actually leads to awards lol)

Extracurriculars:

  • I had a software engineering internship last summer and I’m looking to get some sort of internship (maybe research, maybe a normal one) this summer as well.
  • I’m an officer of the Coding Club and a discussion-based-CS club at my school and I also participate in the Machine Learning Club.
  • I’ll have around 150 hours volunteering as a CS tutor by the end of the summer.
  • I volunteer writing for a newsletter on topics surrounding tech/CS/engineering stuff.
  • There’s USACO/Kaggle that I mentioned before.
  • I build a good amount of personal projects incorporating things like AI and Machine Learning.

Essays/LORs/Other: idk I’m a pretty decent writer but I haven’t written anything yet so who knows what’ll happen. As for my LORs, they probably aren’t amazing given we’ve been online all year but, again, who knows. (UIUC doesn’t even read/require rec letters so there’s that)

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Unfortunately, that refers to all admissions to UIUC. Admission rates to UIUC are around 56%-60%, while admissions to CS are around 15%. So it is unlikely that 80% of the applicants from your high school to UIUC CS are being accepted.

If you are attending the high school that I think that you are attending, though, that 80% overall acceptance for students with your GPA/SAT seems low. It should be higher, since it was 100% for students for similar students for my kid’s school, and, while they are good, they are not as highly regarded as your high school.

On the other hand, perhaps more students from your high school apply exclusively to CS/ and engineering, while students at my kid’s school always added LAS as a second choice (that’s what the GCs always recommended).

I would say that it is somewhere between a low reach and a high target for you, depending on your class list, and assuming that I am correct in my guess as to your high school.

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Some of the CS+X (and Math&CS and Stats&CS) majors probably easier to get in to than CS in Engineering.