<p>Hello I am a rising senior interested in my chances at some of my reaches. Please give my chances at these colleges on a percentage scale (0-100 percent). Here are my stats:</p>
<p>Asian Male, 17
Cambridge, MA
GPA: 4.7
No class ranking at my school (but my guess is 10/500)</p>
<p>Test Scores:
1470 (old SAT)
2200 (new SAT)- retake in Oct. and expecting a 2300+
800,780,740,720,710,700 (SAT IIs)
5,5,4,4 (APs)</p>
<p>ECs:
Robotics team secretary, SAT program president, science club leader, pre-med club vp, magazine associate, NHS, chess club treasurer, volunteering (300+ hours), special olympics club (prez and founder), job (summer)</p>
<p>Awards:
Ap Scholar with Distinction (expected)
Essay on bullying published in a magazine
New England Mathematics League (NEML) 5th place<br>
MA Science Olympiad 4th place<br>
American Mathematics Competition (AMC) finalist & top scorer/ AIME qualifier
essay contest finalist<br>
USA Mathematical Talent Search bronze prize winner<br>
National Latin Exam perfect score<br>
Some major school awards</p>
<p>Hooks:
1st generation to go to college
parents are divorced
low income (<20000)
older brother who smoked marijuana and is sometimes violent and abusive (how do i emphasive this on the college app?)</p>
<p>Very nice accomplishments... Very strong application
Hook Problems...
Low Income- Colleges want donations; not to give financial aid
older brother who smoked marijuana and is sometimes violent and abusive (how do i emphasive this on the college app?)- Maybe if you could REALLY make it work. Just don't make it sound your following in his footsteps</p>
<p>Overall, I think you should be very proud of your accomplishments. One again, I'm very sorry for being critical with your hooks, but I'm sure you can go a little deeper. Maybe you can talk about how you triumphed, just don't emphase your income or divorced parents...
Best of Luck
Harvard- 50/50
MIT- 50/50
Yale-60%
Stanford-70%
Plus, I know this sounds REALLY BAD, but about the income hook, colleges think that its just as easy to accept a rich kid as it is a poor one... Don't worry about it though, I'm sure u could get a scholarship w/ those stats...</p>
<p>What score did you have to get to be in 5th place for NEML? I did NYML, which uses the same tests I believe, and scored a 31, which was one less than i needed to be ranked.</p>
<p>No one has those chances at Ivies, especially with a 2200 and not fantastic ECs. I'd put most of the Ivies as reach, with a slightly stronger shot at MIT. As I said before, your ECs are a little eh, your SATs are low-ish but fine, sounds like you've got some pretty good things going for you. If you focus on the challenges you had to overcome you have a decent shot, but Asian isn't exactly URM. I'd put your chances at a little over the average 10-20% for each of the schools with maybe a 30% shot at MIT if that 800 was in IIc.</p>
<p>You have decent scores, although Harvard might frown upon the number of SAT 2's that you took (makes you look very test-oriented), above-average EC's, and average awards (Math Talent Search isn't very prestigious because the test is not proctored so the college cannot know that you did not receive aid). I don't think that your brother's smoking marijuana is a hook as most people in this country have probably smoked marijuana.</p>
<p>But anyway, I think your probabilities of admission are:
Harvard: 26%
MIT: 30%
Brown: 80%
Stanford: 37%</p>
<p>Now let's be honest: The admit rate at H. last year was 9%. This included all the legacies, development admits, URMs, athletes, sons and daughters of Senators, Congressmen, and ambassadors, published novelists, soloists with major symphony orchestras, Olympians, and discoverers of new mathematical algorithms. Take just those out of the equation, and the admit rate was around 5%, and lower than that for those requiring financial assistance without an extraordinary hook, so let's say 4%. So for the sake of argument, I'll give the OP some extra credit and assume he is an excellent candidate, better than lots, so I'll double it - 8%. This has nothing to do with this particular candidate, who I imagine is a smart, fine, caring, wonderful person - it simply has to do with numbers. Each of the other schools will be multiples of that. 2x, 3x, 4x. Some one IS going to get in of course, but the odds are exactly that - odds.</p>
<p>What's the safety that you LOVE, and expect to be able to afford?</p>
<p>In response to tupac's comment about Math Talent Search, colleges are aware that many achievements can be attained with help from adults. Essays written for school classes or any other graded homework, essay contests, or even research projects fall into the same category sd USAMTS. Because they have no way of finding out how much help kids get, colleges are forced to take most of our achievements with a grain of salt. So since it is no easier to gain an unfair advantage on USAMTS than on anything else, they cannot single out USAMTS in this respect.</p>
<p>However, polaraxis' bronze award is pretty much just a participation certificate. It doesn't indicate any real level of achievement. So it doesn't really matter if he got help or not.</p>
<p>That was not meant to be insulting at all, I'm just stating a fact. Your other accomplishments in math are more impressive than the bronze medal.</p>
<p>I don't think that research projects (ISEF, STS, Siemens) or the olympiads (USAMO, USABO, USAPHO, USACHO) fall into the same category. Students that submit research projects must present them to many judges, by whom they are drilled before they can hope to win a prize. For example, this year as a science fair competitor I probably presented my project and answered technical questions for over 50 professional scientists. Had I received substantial aid from adults, I would not have been able to do this.</p>
<p>USAMTS questions on the other hand could be done entirely by someone else and submitted.</p>
<p>My comment about research projects was beside the point. Obviously poster competitions like ISEF you can only do on your own, but Intel or other written competitions can be coached. Also, students sometimes get their names on articles in research journals more because of family connections than because of any work they actually did.</p>
<p>Regardless, my point has more to do with graded assignments for school. Colleges would rather not take kids who could not have achieved what they did without getting tutored every day. But they have no way of knowing. So if colleges won't look at USAMTS, they might as well not look at English and history grades, and, to a lesser extent, science, math and language grades (because grades are primarily test-based).</p>