Chance me for UT Engineering

I’m currently a senior in the top 5% of my class of 147 (I’m in a small charter school). My GPA is 3.85, my SAT was 1300 but i’m aiming now for a 1400, I’ve taken 5 dual credit classes and 6 AP classes. I have 72+ hours of community service. I am Vice President of NHS and an out-of-school club, both of which I have been in for 2 years. I am Honors team captain of Academic Decathlon, I am in Junior World Affairs Council which I am Recruitment Chair, as well as doing Model United Nations and WorldQuest. I am also project manager of a NASA competition club which I have been a member of for 3 years. I had a summer job at Wendy’s and I’m applying to work at a golf club which I will work at for the rest of the year. UT is a dream school of mine and I intend to major in civil engineering.
I am also in-state and African American if it helps.

I’d say you have a good shot. Civil engineering is one of the less competitive Cockrell Majors. I’m not engineering but a ton of my friends went into engineering, and your stats are better/at least as good as theirs. Your extracurriculars are very good and your stats are also above average (to my knowledge).

That said, a bit of advice from me - I’m pretty sure you’ll get into Civil. But if you’re not sure on what to put for second major, I’d recommend applying for a different engineering option for your first major slot (something that’s more competitive). This is because Civil is the easiest engineering major to internally transfer into, so if you get into a harder engineering major you can go into civil quite easily, while the reverse is much harder (for MechE and ECE, the most competitive ones, you need near perfect GPA). My friends who had similar stats to you got into these harder majors much more easily (its much easier to get into them when you first apply to UT than when you try to internally transfer), and its better to get into the harder majors than the easier ones obviously, cause switching is obviously easier in one direction than the other.

So I can apply for something like Mechanical Engineering as my first choice, and granted I get into civil engineering too, I am able choose civil even if I got into MechE? Because I am interested only in that field.

If you are absolutely certain you want to do Civil and not any other type of engineering, you could put civil engineering as your first choice.

If you are not absolutely certain however (a lot of people change majors once they are in college), I would put a more competitive engineering that you are still interested in (BME, MechE, ChemE, etc) as first choice and civil as second choice. If you choose one of those majors and get accepted into them, it is far easier to swap into civil, as long as you maintain a decent gpa.

The way it works is that UT looks at your first choice before your second choice. If you get into your first choice, they disregard your second choice. You don’t get into both. If you don’t get into your first choice, then they consider your second choice. But with these engineerings, if you get into the more competitive one you can easily swap into civil later on. But as I said before, if you get into UT and decide you want to pursue a different type of engineering like MechE or ChemE, you need near perfect GPAs to do it. I just see it as a much safer option.