Intended School: School of Computer Science (CMU) Early Decision
Grade: 12
Race: Asian (Chinese international student)
Gender: Female
School: pretty famous public school
GPA: 4.4/4.5 unweighted
Rank: school does not rank
SAT: 1530 (730 RW 800 M)
SAT II: Math 2 800, Physics 790
ACT: Did not take
TOEFL: 116/120
AP’s: (all self study cause I’m in national curriculum and school doesn’t offer AP)
Calculus BC (5), AB Subscore (5), Computer Science A (5), Physics C-Mechanics (5), Statistics (5), Microeconomics (5)
Senior Year: 3 more APs, honor math and cs classes, 15 courses in total
Honors:
USACO Platinum Medal; National Olympiad Information Contest first prize(top 5%); AMC12 Honor award(top 3% internationally); FRC Rookie all star;
ECS:
Informatics contest(coding) club (3 years) – won some national and international awards
film production club (3 years) – led 20+ film production with 6000+ clicks online
Writing a book on advanced data structure (to be issued around December)
Conducted research on cs-film (special effects……) with JHU professor (paper not published)
basketball championship of school
Stanford/CMU/Tsinghua(best university in China) summer programs
Work Experience: intern as web design engineer in national engineering research center
Volunteering: Beijing Planetarium tour guide; recruit and train new members; taught astronomy to kids
Kind of worried my SAT reading score is a little low for SCS
Please let me know my chances, thanks!
It’s a very tough program for admissions. You background is impressive but there will many other similar applicants for only about 400 acceptances. Once you eliminate the applicants that have less impressive profiles but are hoping to win the lottery, and the slots taken by students with similar profiles but 1580+, AMO qualifier, etc, you’re probably in a pool of a few thousand for 300 slots. All are qualified and would probably succeed, but only 10% or so will be offered admission.
don’t worry too much, i will say you have an 80% or higher chance of admission by cmu scs, the biggest advantage you have is your gender, not that many girls can get amc12 honor.
You have good chances - being a girl in CS is a plus (CMU is one of the big univ which tries to to be 50-50 in gender balance - while the competition among girls is equally fierce, there is advantage)
One advice; you mentioned about writing a “book” on data structures:
Is it an article or a book? - if it’s an article say so; if it’s a book - is it published by a publishing house or is it a collection of your writings in an e-book?
If its latter (an e-book) don’t bother to mention it. For someone as young as you and with limited experience - can almost guarantee that claiming of writing “data structures” book sounds over the-top exaggeration. You have fantastic credentials otherwise - but writing a book in a theoretical field like data structures is a different ball game (when AO’s see things like this there is a danger that you are just rehashing a few notes together and claiming big - it can even take the shine off of your other excellent provable accomplishments). I would be careful.