Chance Me Please! Cornell ED, JHU, NW, Vandy, UM, UVA, etc.

-Ohio

-Public School, Moderately Competitive, Suburban, Senior

-UW GPA: ~3.8, W GPA: 4.333 (school only uses W)

-Rank: Unknown (School doesn’t report), would guess top 20/340 in class.

-Percentile: Top 5%

-White, Male, Income= ~ $100,000, First-gen college student

-Fluent in Russian?

ACT: Best Composite – 31, Superscore – 33 (English -34, Math-35, Reading-29, Science- 32)

SAT: N/A

SAT Subject Tests: N/A

AP Classes:

9- Unable to take (school policy)

(Everything else Honors, if possible)

10- Can only take 2 (school policy)

AP Human Geography
AP US History
(Everything else Honors, if possible)

11-

AP American Government + Politics
AP Language + Composition
AP Physics 1
AP Psychology
AP Statistics 
(Everything else Honors, if possible)

12-

AP Chemistry
AP Modern European History
AP Literature + Composition
AP Spanish
AP Physics 2
AP Calculus BC

AP Scores:

Mostly 4’s and 5’s, two 3’s. Upset about those 3’s, but can’t do anything about it now. 

Awards:

AP Scholar with Distinction
NHS
SNHS
Academic Quiz Team – Red, White, and Blue Award (school thing)

Activities:

Student Council – 10,11,12
Academic Quiz Team – 11,12
Junior Volunteer at local hospital – 10,11,12
Jewish Family Service Passover Delivery – 9,10,11,12
Recreational/Intramural Basketball League – 9,10,11,12
JV Soccer – 9
Work, bagger at local grocer – 11
Cincinnati Regional Science Bowl – 11
Various volunteering through school district – 9,10,11,12
Model United Nations Club – 12

Essays:

In my opinion, I believe they were very good. Proofread by myself as well as a family friend who is a professional editor. Very personal, one deals with substance abuse within my family, the other about how I was embarrassed about my parents being foreign.

Recommendations:

Both 11th grade AP teachers who I thought knew me well, straight A’s in those classes. One is a teacher of the year in Ohio, FWIW.

Early Decision:

Cornell University – CALS – Global and Public Health Sciences Major

Early Decision II:

University of Chicago (if ED to Cornell fails)

Regular Decision:

Brown
Dartmouth
Duke
Johns Hopkins
Northwestern
Michigan
Notre Dame
Penn
Virginia
Vanderbilt
Ohio State – Safety

My thoughts:

Too many reaches, too few safeties? What are your thoughts? I guess I am banking on getting into one of the schools other than OSU. Worst case, I don’t get in anywhere except OSU, and I will go there, but I really do not want to do that.

Michigan is a reach for below average uwGPA and 25th percentile ACT.

Hi. You might want to replace some of those reaches with lower reaches. (For example, replace Penn, Brown, and Duke with Emory, Tufts, USC (these schools are all very strong in the health sciences)) and maybe add some matches like Wake Forest, NYU, URochester, Brandeis, BU, etc.