So I’ve been heavily considering this school after visiting it a few weeks ago. My biggest concern is that I come off as too narrow/single-minded in terms of my application, focusing on bio. Could someone take a look?
SAT: 2340
SAT 2: Bio-M, Chem, Physics: All 800
GPA: 3.91 UW/4.41 W
Recs: Bio teacher, should be fantastic. 10/10
The other is from my science competition adviser, should be great. 9/10
Counselor Rec: 7-9/10, not really sure.
APs: Bio, Chem, Macro/Micro, Calc BC, Physics 1, World: 5, APUSH: 4
Senior year APs: English, Physics C, Chinese, plus a university biology course + orgo
Extracurriculars:
Science Olympiad captain
Biology Olympiad captain
Science Bowl captain
Middle school Science Bowl coaching
Molecular biology research club
Varsity crew
Research at a biotech firm
Nothing wrong with it. You have a good variety of activities within the interest area and I doubt chi worries about lopsided people, not that you are. Unis at that level expect you to be good at everything, you have to complete the core. Not sure if. It is wise to omit a teacher rec from the eng/hits side as is usual. I don’t chance, a fools activity.
I don’t know that anyone can chance accurately for Chicago anymore. Your resume above is completely consistent with being a strong candidate for admission. I agree with BrownParent that you should get a non-science teacher to write your other recommendation if you can. Don’t go to someone who doesn’t know you, or who doesn’t like you, for that reason, but understand that if your two recommendations are from your biology teacher and your science competition coach, the admissions staff will draw an inference that you had no humanities or social science teacher who knew who you were or who was willing to go to bat for you. I don’t think that would be enough to sink your application, but it would be the most negative thing from the information on this page.
Luckily for you, you get to show what you can do, humanities-wise, by writing good essays. That ought to answer any one-sidedness questions the admissions staff has. Your essays will determine whether your application is great or merely good.
Your stats and extracurriculars are very similar to mine when I applied for admission a couple years ago. I too was a rather lopsided science candidate (Science Olympiad, Science Bowl, etc.) with a concentration in chemistry rather than biology. Instead of crew, I took part in Quiz Bowl, but all else aside the similarities are surreal.
I got the chance to read my admissions files through a FERPA request last spring, (the same way the Stanford students got to read their files) as did a number of my other curious friends who requested to read theirs. I think the thing I was most surprised to see was that there were absolutely no comments about our extracurricular awards. The sample size is of course small and perhaps other people received comments there, but there was no indication anywhere that the state and national level awards in my chosen field of concentration were a significant demonstration of my competence/potential to succeed. Instead, nearly all the substantive comments were about my essays. My essays had nothing to do with my interest in biology or chemistry; rather, they were practically the complete opposite. For my long essay, I wrote a long-winded philosophical ramble about my inability to play a musical instrument and how that taught me about empathy and self-confidence, and my Why UChicago was a rather gushy, impressionist account of a visit to campus and how what I saw in UChicago was what I had aspired for in high school. I think if you make it clear through your essays that you are intellectually curious about more than just biology (demonstrated through anecdote, essay topic, or perhaps just the depth of feeling in your essays), that you consider yourself more than just your science awards, and that you are open-minded about academic fields different from your own, then being a lopsided or pointy candidate instead of being well-rounded is no hindrance at all.
To agree with the above posters, you should definitely pursue a teacher rec from a non-science teacher. It is a red flag not only when you don’t have anything to show for your humanities/social science side, but also when you don’t adhere to the admissions guidelines that say that you should have a humanities/social science LOR. Though I applied for chemistry and would have probably gotten a great LOR from my chemistry teacher, I instead went with my calculus teacher who probably had a lot of positive anecdotal experience to write for my letter. My humanities LOR came from my Spanish teacher, who I chose in part because his class was the hardest humanities class for me and I had done the most work for him to see - I knew he could write something about work ethic, a clear trend in improvement, some character stuff, etc. that an english teacher who I had for a semester probably wouldn’t be able to write. I didn’t say anything about pursuing math or Spanish in college, so it was probably a good shout-out for diversity of interests in general.
A lot of people go on about how pointiness > well rounded when it comes to college admissions and sometimes I wonder if UChicago cares about double pointiness. The amount of people here who are interested in math and philosophy, cs and english literature, biology and slavic languages, and so on and so forth is so disproportional to people I’ve met while mooching around with my friends at other top schools, let alone in the general population, that it feels like UChicago admissions is specifically filtering for that.
But you probably still have a chance. Who the heck knows what goes on in the mysterious halls of Rosenwald?