Female, junior, will be majoring in mechanical engineering.
I’m also Filipino and my parents are immigrants; they didn’t go to school here.
GPA: 4.2 W, 3.7 UW
SAT I: taking next week
SAT II: math 2 and physics - taking in June
AP World History, AP US History, AP Physics I, AP English Language
Senior Year: AP Calculus, AP Statistics, AP Computer Science, AP Physics II, AP Literature
ECs:
Academic/Technical:
FIRST Robotics (main EC at 25-40 hours per week. mechanical lead, aspiring captain. wish me luck lol.)
United Nations Foundation: Girl Up (public relations officer)
Lighting/Tech Crew (assistant lighting director)
Mu Alpha Theta
Math Club
National Honor Society
Performance:
New England regional competitive pianist (New England Cup qualifier)
Philippine Cultural Show
As of now, I will be applying to Columbia, MIT, Cornell, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Northeastern, Boston University, UCONN, RPI, WPI, and Drexel.
Your list is wildly unbalanced. Make sure you have more safeties in your final college list. In addition, run net price calculators and talk to your parents about budget. A couple of those schools are known for stuffing their aid packages with loans.
@momofsenior1 PSAT was okay. More recent practice tests are giving me scores closer to the averages/benchmarks of those schools. As for the UW GPA, it actually comes out to a 3.83 (my school doesn’t provide it for me). I don’t know if that changes much.
Good! UCONN is a strong backup option and a very respectable program. ALL excellent students need excellent options. FYI: U of Maine and possibly URI are offering special tuition rates to students from other New England colleges. Check them out.
Interest in CS and Robotics is very high and this is the time of year when we can all read about financial problems with the high costs of university. Look as carefully into these programs as you do Columbia, MIT, ETC. Don’t apply to colleges you cannot see yourself attending.
It appears from other CC discussions that WPI, MIT, RPI et al are trying to raise their ratio of female students and you can probably do the work anywhere, but this does not, unfortunately, mean you will get in everywhere at a rate you can afford. Selectively pad your university application pool!
Please note the latest common data set (CDS) I could find on the WPI websites: 76.78% of WPI students have GPAs > 3.75 with AVG GPA of 3.86 and four of your targeted schools are more selective than WPI. If admitted, with enough funding, you can do the work at any of them. WPI is trying as hard as any of them to raise that ratio to 50/50. This works in your favor. None of these schools are too good for you, but that does not mean you will gain admission with an affordable price tag.
You might drop off some of the single percent admissions schools (e.g., MIT, Yale, Columbia) UNLESS you really have your heart set on one of them after you look more deeply into your program options. Check out the CDS data on their websites and you can dig up the GPA and test score of students admitted in the last class.
Do your homework on each school’s programs. For WPI you might start with https://www.wpi.edu/project-based-learning/wpi-plan. You might also want to consider Clarkson University @ https://www.clarkson.edu/ . It is way out in upstate NY and has a very well established engineering reputation. I cannot find the CDS on their website, but your guidance office may know.
Be confident in your ability to handle the work if motivated. Your academics are not in doubt. It is just the insanity of the current admissions crush in the STEM areas.