<p>I'm an incoming junior at a fairly large public high school.
GPA: 3.92 UW 4.85 W
Rank: 4/475
PSAT: 154 in 9th; 190 in 10th (not my strong point. However, I came from a bad middle school which explains the 154. I also plan on doing a lot of prep this summer for the SAT and ACT)
PLAN test (practice ACT): projected ACT score 29-33 (no prep once again)
EC's: -Varsity basketball this year as a soph on a good team, we went to state
-Math team coach in alg2 and geometry
-Math team captain
-Hopefully math club vp or president next year
-Tutor kids in math and science
-active in Church Youth Group
-NHS
-Varsity Golf 2 years
-Working on creating an App
Classes: taking all IB/AP classes
-took AP world as a freshman and got a 5
-this year I took AP physics B and AP euro and am expecting a 5 on both
-also expecting good scores on the IB exams
-next year I'm taking all AP's/IB including seven AP exams: AP Physics C EM & MEC,
Stats (self-study), US History, Chem, computer science A(self-study), English Lang
-Senior year I'm taking all AP/IB's again same deal as junior year
Other:
-Me and a few of my buddies in the math club have basically taken the math team<br>
from being a non-competitive, boring team to be on to a competitive, winning team<br>
through all of our hard work and through the countless hours we dedicate to it.
- I was an AIME qualifier last year and hopefully will be again this year.
Colleges Considering Applying to:
Harvard, Princeton, MIT, CalTech, Georgia Tech, Columbia, Cornell, Georgetown, Notre
Dame, Emory, UNC, UF
If you guys could let me know how you think I'm doing and which of these schools I have a decent chance of getting into that would be greatly appreciated. And please be honest. I can take it (sorry grandma this one isn't for you).</p>
<p>anything at all?</p>
<p>Keep on establishing your EC to show passion on something. Come back with real scores for chancing.</p>
<p>I agree with the above poster that your EC’s need to be strengthened/focused. I don’t see much, if any leadership, except for maybe the Math club. In general, they seem pretty generic. Also, unless the tutoring counts, there seems to be no community service/involvement, which might hurt you, particularly at a school like ND. As far as test scores, they matter. A lot. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Make sure you are prepared. Without knowing a couple of things (state residency, hooks, etc.), it is kind of hard to predict. I will tell you that this year admission to top schools was brutally competitive. To put it in some context, my D will be attending ND in the fall. She applied EA, was deferred, then accepted RD. Her stats were excellent: 4.0 GPA (UW), 2250 SAT, tons of leadership, Catholic, several real mission trips, not boondoggles, 3 sport varsity athlete, many awards, etc., had excellent recs, essays were terrific. So it’s hard, very hard, to gain admission to top schools, but the better prepared and focused you are, the better the outcome will be. Good luck!</p>
<p>^ Congrats. What other schools she applied to? She sounds like an excellent candidate for many top schools.</p>
<p>^Accepted :IU (Honors), Villanova, Fordham, UVA (OOS), W&M (OOS), Wellesley, in addition to ND.
Waitlisted: Amherst
Denied: Dartmouth, Princeton (Didn’t really care on either or Amherst and never demonstrated interest - ND was really her first choice.)</p>
<p>^ Great. Good success rate too. My D will be applying next year. She is not interested in Ivies at all but she wants to try Stanford. We are still thinking whether to apply ND.</p>
<p>Thanks for the replies. Yeah I definitely am going to do a lot of prep for the SAT/ACT. And I guess it’s my fault for never really mentioning it but I actually do a lot of community service. I volunteer at various basketball camps, church events, tutoring, etc.</p>
<p>Good… You still have plenty of time. Get a good score at PSAT in October. It is very feasible for you to get beyond the cutoff and become a semifinalist. Work hard in the summer to prepare for the tests and get them done with good scores as early as possible. That would leave you plenty of time to work on other things that may help your application.</p>
<p>It’s too early right now without any concrete scores I really could only say Georgia Tech, UNC, and UF are all matches based on the fact you’re an AIME qualifier, I think if you make USAMO next year you will be matches for most of these schools.</p>
<p>Be wary of viewing any Ivy or equivalent as a match. They are reaches for all but the most hooked applicants.</p>
<p>Hooks have all size and shape. Not all students admitted to Ivies have an obvious hook. The acceptance rates are low for those schools, but one may still comment on the stat. Otherwise, there is no point in chancing them if they are all reach. I do agree they are reaches for most people though. Even for schools with 25-30% acceptance rate, a matching stat does not mean one will be admitted either.</p>
<p>^I think you may have misunderstood my thought. I would only classify an Ivy or equivalent as anything but a reach for maybe .01% of applicants. What is scary is what you noted. Matching stats do not guarantee admission. At the ND session for admitted students, we were told that over 2/3 of applicants with perfect SAT scores were denied this year. And you are absolutely correct that hooks aren’t obvious, but these days even the most hooked applicants are not a sure thing. If you’d like to DM me, I can elaborate further based on what I saw this year. My advice to my daughter and her friends when they asked whether I thought they could get into a school was to tell them that the only way they would definitely not get in was to not apply. I’m a big believer in applying to a few high reach schools, because you just never know.</p>
<p>In reality, in average almost 10% applicants still got admitted to the Ivies which is 1000x of 0.1%. ;-)</p>
<p>^ You misunderstood my point. The .01% is the most hooked of the hooked applicants, whether they are a quarterback that the football team covets, or an applicant whose last name is on the library, or better yet, a quarterback whose last name is on a building. Those are the kids for whom these schools are anything but a reach. If you have stellar grades, test scores, ECs, etc. you are very much like every other applicant and to a certain degree whether or not you are admitted is somewhat up to chance. Did you write an essay that your reader somehow connected with, or did your file get given to the next reader? Do you play the trombone and did all of the trombone players in the marching band graduate? Are you a female applying to an engineering school that has a relatively high percentage of male students and might be looking to even out the ratio? I guess what I am trying to say is it’s tough out there. To the OP, your stats will probably be in the ballpark for a lot of very competitive schools. Just make sure you end up applying to at least one or two schools that, while they may not be your uber-competitive, Ivy League type school, are places that you can see yourself spending a very happy four years at and are academic as well as financial safeties.</p>
<p>thanks for the input guys. anyone else?</p>