I applied to UChicago through EA admission plan, can you please chance me
International student from Serbia
SAT: 1460 comp; 790 math, 670 ebrw, 15 essay
TOEFL: 105/120
GPA (unweighted; my school does not weight gpa): 5.0/5.0
Class rank: 2/240
Senior year courses: 13 (all of them full year) - 1 high honors, 7 honors
AP, IB: my school does not offer any of those
Honors: A four-time winner of National Linguistics Award; Received most original and 3rd best overall award for a research paper in geography at National Research Paper Competition; Winner of ‘Stihovizija’ - Competition in Poetry in Foreign Languages; Regional English Language Champion; Member of top 100 high-school students in Serbia as ranked by the Ministry of Youth and Sports in 2016
Activities: Wrote a book for children in German language together with a few other students from my school; Attended a workshop in journalism in Croatia conducted in German language; Member of a programming club at my school
Around 200 hours of community work - taught English to kids at a summer camp in Russia, and was a part of public debate team in Serbia with a goal to raise awareness of importance of preschool education
Member of Regional Center for Talented Children in mathematics and linguistics
Have been playing tennis for 10 years, two-time club champion
Recommendations: English, Arts and Chemistry teachers
Intended major: Applied for joint Bx/MS in Computer Science: Professionally Oriented Non-Computer Science Major through I wish to connect General Linguistics and Programming (Computational linguistics)
So what do you think? I know my test scores may not be top-notch, but I think they are pretty solid for an international student (idk), but I really think my extracurriculars can compensate for a bit lower scores than expected at UC.
I think you are a strong candidate. Can you or do you want to play tennis in college? Have you reached out to the tennis coach? Any hook helps. Score is low, but your math is exceptional and I suspect “English” was more of your problem then your ability on “thinking” on the written portion.
@BrianBoiler Yeah, I wish to continue playing tennis in college. I have contacted the head coach, and he encouraged me to apply, saying he will advocate for me, but that he does not actually have that much of an influence to the final decision since it is made only by admission officers.
I think the biggest problem for me on the Reading section of the SAT was the short time cap. Generally, I am a slow reader, needing a bit more time to absorb, digest and think about what I am reading, and I’ve never had the need to read serious texts like that so fast (I’ve always read them for pleasure, so why would I?). I tried to become quicker, but did not really had that much time to practice, but I think that combined with my TOEFL score, admission will be able to see I am not that bad in English
Well, besides Serbian, which is my native language, I speak English fluently, and German pretty decently. I also speak Croatian and Bosnian, since they are now considered separate languages, but Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian are essentially the same language.
That’s cool. The fact that your Serbian will help. I’m thinking that will probably be a pretty small group represented in the application pool. Plus your ECs are uber unique. Good luck.
@espressopatronum , what you said above about the slowness with which you read serious writing and the pleasure of doing it that way was both acute as an observation and well-expressed. It doesn’t need any excuse. Make it your battle-cry! You seem to have the right stuff as UChicago sees it. You ought to have a fighting chance.
Impressive resume. I suspect your biggest problem is the TOEFL score, which is just above the UChicago minimum (and pretty much explains your SAT CR score). Your tiny writing sample here doesn’t show any obvious weakness in
English, and you have prizes for English on your resume, so maybe that’s enough to bolster the score. Did you get subscores of at least 26 on all sections?
I agree that being Serbian will probably be a plus (assuming there aren’t lots of other strong applications from Serbs), but it’s less exotic than you might think. There are lots of ethnic Serbs in Chicago with strong cultural identities.
@JHS Here are my TOEFL subscores:
Reading: 29
Speaking: 26
Listening: 27
Writing: 23
You’re right, it is just above the threshold, but I must say that I really hated TOEFL, I don’t think it’s a really good representative of one’s English knowledge. I took Cambridge’s CPE (C2 level) and got an A, but only TOEFL and IELTS are accepted in the US…
Yeah, being from Serbia might not be that surprising at UC - after all Chicago is the city with the greatest number of Serbs in the whole US.
I guess I will just have to wait Even with the highest possible test scores you can still get rejected (and as I’ve seen, it happens rather often), but I just wanted to know if I stand a chance at all based on my resume. So thank you guys for sharing your opinions I was quite nervous; now you cheered me up
Even with the highest possible test scores you can still get rejected (and as I’ve seen, it happens rather often), but I just wanted to know if I stand a chance at all based on my resume. So thank you guys for sharing your opinions