<p>General Things
Gender: Male
Ethnicity: East Indian (international)
Country: India (but living in Singapore for 16 years)
Current Grade: Senior Year (in singapore, schools run from Jan-Dec)
Financial Aid: Not applying for any sort of FA</p>
<p>Grades
UC GPA: 3.56 (Sharp rising trend)</p>
<p>SAT Reasoning Test (best single sitting)
SAT Critical Reading - 760
SAT Math - 790
SAT Writing 800
SAT Composite - 2350</p>
<p>SAT Subject Tests
SAT Math Level 2 - 800
SAT Physics - 790
SAT Chemistry 780
SAT Biology M - 770</p>
<p>AP Tests
AP Calculus AB 5
AP Chemistry 5
AP Physics B 5
AP Biology 5
AP Calculus BC 5
AP Statistics 5</p>
<p>Extracurricular Activities
- Captain: Debate Team
- President: Creative Writing Circle
- Editor: School Yearbook
- Editor: School Newsletter (we don't publish too actively tho)
- Editor: Official Newsletter of Singapore Int'l Mathematics Competition
- Captain: Scrabble Team (placed 3rd nationally in 2007, several individual awards at national level too)
- Head Delegate: Model UN
- Tennis Team
- National Education Ambassador
- 300ish Community Service Hours
- Creative Arts Program (very selective program for writers and poets)
- Research on atomic spectroscopy
- Research on oxygen's behavior on palladium and applications in fuel cells
- Interned at a renowned museum of biodiversity research
- 2 Commendatory Awards @ Commonwealth Int'l Essay Writing Competition
- Gold (Drama) @ Singapore Youth Festival
- Best Delegate @ Singapore Model United Nations 2009
- Best Delegate @ WE International Model United Nations 2009</p>
<p>I took up my IB in Singapore and applied to Berkeley too but that was about 10 years ago or so. lol And, like you, I’m not Singaporean; I’m Italian. </p>
<p>your SAT scores are better than mine (I got 1480 but there were only 2 parts back then). However, my GPA was higher than yours. I was in the top 5% of my batch and yet I was rejected at Berkeley.</p>
<p>If you can work it out to be in the top 10% of your graduating batch, you may have a good chance at Berkeley. Otherwise, you better start applying to some fallback schools. In my case, a few Ivies accidentally became my fallback schools.</p>
<p>pretty high chance in my opinion. i got lower scores than you in… everything? my GPA was about the same as yours, i didn’t have any AP, and i got in this year.</p>
<p>the financial situation in berkeley has probably made it marginally easier for internationals to get in these few years, which should explain the increasing number of internationals getting accepted by berkeley.</p>
<p>that said, you should still apply to safety schools. admissions is a weird thing.</p>
<p>out of interest, are from currently studying in RJC?</p>
<p>^ Perhaps the financial crises have pushed Berkeley to accept more international students this year as all international students are full-paying students. </p>
<p>Looking back, that might be true. My friend’s son who graduated from a posh school in England got into Berkeley mathematics. But then again, he was a stellar student in his A-Level classes and was admitted to all top US schools he has applied to (Cambridge, Warwick, LSE, Stanford, Caltech and Cornell included) except one - MIT. He’s now very happy at Cal. </p>
<p>OP, if this is true, you should take advantage of this. ;)</p>
<p>^ I did. But, overall, American schools are better. If you want to study in the UK, you may do so through an exchange program where you do modules there instead of doing the whole undergrad program. Berkeley, for instance, has arrangements with Oxbridge and most of the best ones in the UK such as LSE, Imperial, Warwick, UCL, King’s, Bristol, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Bath and York.</p>
<p>@RML: Hopefully, this international advantage would work in my favor but I’m most interested in whether it’ll be enough to circumvent my GPA problems. </p>
<p>@yeejietang: I’m not a student at RJ; I attend the NUS High School.</p>