White male, very low-income, South Carolina, plan to apply ED.
Major: BBA with concentration in Finance
Stats:
GPA: 3.6 UW (Freshman year was terrible, 3.9 if Freshman year isn’t included), 4.3 weighted
Rank: Top 19% right now, should move up somewhat after this semester’s grades are factored in.
SAT: Should be 1500+ judging by practice tests (taking in August)
ACT: Probably like 30 lol, should get scores back in a few days. Didn’t study.
Rigor: Mostly Honors, one AP Junior year, 5 Senior year
ECs:
Family responsibilities. I have a disabled mother. I also have to buy most of the household items since our grandparents have it hard enough paying our other bills. (2 years)
JV+Varsity Baseball, JV Captain freshman year (4 years)
Piano, self-taught (4 years)
Part-time job doing renovations and manual labor (3 years)
Adult choir member at church (3 years)
4H Club-Vice presidency (3 years)
100+ hours of volunteer work through church (3 years)
Recs: Probably average. I do online school so I only see my teachers every so often. I could definitely get good supplemental recs.
Essays: Should be quite good. Plan to write about my debates with my church’s pastor and Sunday school teacher. Will also include a snippet of when I first questioned God at 6 years old (funny story).
Anyways, what are my chances home slices?
@wuturmelun I would say that your chances are maybe only alright and that is largely because of you applying ED, hopefully ED1? If ED2 or RD, chances go down substantially simply due to statistics. Your background and situation may make you somewhat unique for a person applying to this type of school, and Emory actually values that so it helps. Emory likes high grades (sensible, they correlate better with college grades than scores), so may take a look into your GPA and rank versus how competitive/difficult your school is assuming that people from your school have attended Emory in the past. Your ECs are pretty standard for an elite in this range, so you will primarily be judged by your essays and stats. If you are applying ED2, cross as many fingers as possible lol and I would even say that to folks with stronger ECs and grades than yours. If Emory maintains the relatively (Emory looks like it has gone from hovering between 15-17k applicants to hovering between 20ishk and 25ishk depending on the year. This is quite the shift) high volume it has been getting for the past 2-3 cycles, the other two rounds will be difficult and seemingly random. ED1 will remain the best shot for quite a while if one can sell their interest in the school and write good essays.
*Also, please explore other options on top of business. No need for tunnel vision before even applying. There are many other potentially lucrative options that even reside in ECAS (QSS is one of them, since you must be into math more than normal pursuing finance). In addition, you can access a business career without a BBA. Really up to the type of undergraduate training and internships you access. If you found an alternative way to develop math skills, you could attend a career fair before even applying to GBS and you may be selected for an internship or straight up summer position at a company that recruits from Emory. Sometimes seemingly smooth paths like a BBA are not what they are cracked up to be and many wish they pursued other things as an undergraduate.There are also many joint-major and ECAS-GBS concentration options popping up for if you do have a dual interest best served by taking courses or remaining connected with the college. Just my 2 cents.
I’m applying ED1. I emailed the admissions crew last night and they said that they value a nice upward trend, which is a plus for me since my Junior and Sophomore grades are very good, with Junior year being the best. English is my strong suit (although my math is quickly catching up), so I’m assuming I can write a nice and unique essay.
About the second thing, I am also looking into other options as well. While I may get lucky and wholeheartedly enjoy the BBA+finance track, my feelings may change during undergrad. As you said, I don’t have to apply to GBS until sophomore year, so I’ll have time to figure it out.
Thanks for the advice!
@wuturmelun : What I really mean is to SERIOUSLY explore in that freshman and sophomore year as opposed to only taking the GBS pre-reqs and selecting the easiest courses outside of it to ensure access to GBS come application time. I see this a lot and it practically results in many students shooting themselves in the foot. Some end up disappointed with their choice and you actually have quite a few who underperform in GBS because they had up till then avoided being academically challenged. That scheme works if you are say pre-law or pre-health where you don’t start professional school until after graduating and many of said professional schools are migrating away from grades and rankings, but for GBS UG, the grades and ability to perform actually matters, and thus so does prior preparation. GBS clearly does take into account rigor of non-GBS related courses (as in those outside of the pre-reqs). Evidence is the fact that they take many pre-healths either are switching from that track after earning not competitive grades or are doubling (BBA and pre-med) yet have imperfect STEM GPAs that bring their GPAs lower than the average GBS admit (GBS aso STRONGLY encourages continued writing requirements to be completed before b-school entrance meaning they want students to take the CWRs that they deem as more intensive, which usually reside in ECAS. Their website takes this into account: http://goizueta.emory.edu/degree/undergraduate/admissions/academic_requirements.html ). This means that you have quite a bit of wiggle room outside of those key GBS pre-reqs like decision science/analytics (w/e), financial accounting, and the economics preparation. You can take some fun classes outside of that and they do not really have to be easy. As long as you can do decently (B or higher) in an alternative area of exploration and make mostly B+ and higher in the BBA pre-reqs, you would likely be fine. I think that the average GPA for incoming BBA students is high only because, bluntly, many of them kind of screwed around the first couple of years at Emory. Again, the formula of “do okay in BBA pre-reqs, select random GERs that are easy A’s to balance out any slip up in pre-reqs” is fairly dominant. Just be more deliberate in choosing GERs/other courses is what I am saying. Pre-business culture will tell you otherwise, but it is your education and job prospects.
Interestingly, there is a proliferation of BBA math and CS minors and majors.
@wuturmelun
Let’s see what that SAT looks like. As of right now you you are a Reach/ High Reach. You need to explain you go in a compelling way especially if you class rank isn’t high.