Chance Me - OOS Biological Sciences

Hello. I am a OOS senior from Oregon. I applied back in October and I wish I knew about this forum then as the process of labeling my high school courses A-G was super confusing. I now know, for example, that I incorrectly listed all of my non-AP honors courses as “honors” even though they are not UC recognized since I am attending an OOS high school. Does the SLO supercomputer know to switch them to regular or will this come back to haunt me if I am admitted? This is one area where the CSU application instructions should be improved.

My stats:

  • Biological sciences major

  • 4.0 UW and 4.28 CSU weighted before they correct my five honors classes mentioned above. I assume my adjusted CSU weighted will be somewhere around 4.05 as I only have 4 AP classes but three of them are this year.

  • My high school doesn’t rank

  • 29.5 A-G courses: 4 history; 4 English; 4.5 math; 1.5 biological sciences; 3 physical sciences; 4 foreign language; 3.5 arts; 5 college prep. (I forgot to include one year of middle school Algebra in my application)

  • 6-10 hours/week of work (includes internship in my major field of study) and 11-15 hours/week of extracurriculars (including leadership roles). I would have bumped these hours up a bit if I knew about MCA as I estimated my hours on the low end.

I guess those are all the factors the supercomputer considers. FWIW, I got a 33 on the ACT but that doesn’t help me at SLO. So far I’ve been accepted at Oregon, OR State, SDSU, Penn State and CU Boulder which is great. Still waiting on many others.

Thanks for reading.

What are your long term plans with a major in biological sciences? Are you thinking of premed as an option?

I do understand that there are other options as well for a biology major (one daughter currently works in biotech).

Do you have any budget limits?

You already have some very good acceptances.

yes, premed right now, MD or NP depending on how things go, but open to other career paths in health sciences. I am super thankful to already have good options, but my top two are SLO and UCSB, but both may be out of reach.

First of all Cal Poly SLO has a different GPA calculation so instead of 10-11th a-g course grades with an 8 semester cap on Honors points(CSU GPA) they use 9-11th grades with the same Honors point cap.

OOS applicants are in a separate applicant pool and the admit rates are higher than in-state unfortunately I have no specific data for 2022 but the OOS admit rate for 2021 was around 60%. The OOS applicants were about 1/8th the number of In-state applicants(6500 vs 48500)

Biology has an estimated admit rate around 13% so all applicants should consider it a Reach school for Biology.

College of Science and Mathematics Freshman profile.

SLO GPA 4.14 – 4.25
Number Applied 11,317
Percent Accepted 34.0%

Thanks Gumbymom. My 4.0 UW includes 9th but it looks like my SLO GPA will be be just below the range you listed once they change my honors classes to regular. Do you know if their computer does that automatically?

Unfortunately I do not know if the computer algorithms account for these changes or if they are flagged and manually reviewed and changed.

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“Reach” was going to be my guess, but @Gumbymom knows the public university system in California far, far, far better than I do.

If you want to keep the option open to go to medical school, then you should budget for a full 8 years with the last 4 being quite expensive. Doctors are relatively decently paid and can handle some debt. However, even doctors have trouble paying off the cost of medical school. The less debt the better. If you could graduate with an MD and no debt that would be even better if it were possible. Of course this means that if you can get a bachelor’s degree with no debt and money left in the college fund this might be helpful down the road.

The University of Oregon is very good for premed and might save you a bundle being in-state. As you might already know, Oregon State University has a very good DVM program. The pre-vet classes overlap a lot with premed classes (one daughter is currently studying for a DVM, and very seriously considered Oregon State – she was in a lot of the same classes as premed students for her bachelor’s degree).

I meant to add: Congratulations on your very good results to date, which to me appears to be well earned through your hard work through high school.

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Good advice, thanks.

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I agree with @DadTwoGirls regarding affordability and possible Medical school.

SLO, SDSU and UCSB offer little to no financial aid to OOS students so figure on paying full fees at these schools.
UCSB at $67K/Year x4
SLO at $50K/ Year x4
SDSU at $44K/Year x4.

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