Extra Curricular:
Band for 4 years, Section Leader for 2. Made the All Region Band 2 years as well.
Robotics for 2 years, went to state championship. This has been very helpful because I’ve been able to learn CAD design and programming in C.
Varsity Tennis for 4 years, I’ve placed 1st at about 8 tournaments.
National Honor Society.
Phi Theta Kappa at my local community college from dual credit.
Volunteering
Volunteered at a week long activity called Camp Invention, mentoring kids about electronics and STEM fields
Played for a local church’s orchestra for 3 years
Work Experience
Worked at a peach orchard as a cashier for 2 summers
Tech intern at the school district for 1 summer as well.
I’m not sure if this will be good enough to get me in to Cockrell, as I know it’s pretty competitive. Should I retake my ACT and shoot for something in 30s? Anything else to strengthen my application?
You will get likely get CAPd. Those are pretty similar stats to one of my daughter’s friends (rank was more towards #20 but still in top 7%) and I think his ACT was either 29 or 30. He was CAPd and elected to turn it down and take a full engineering acceptance at a regional UT branch where he is thriving.
Do you have time to even re-take the ACT? Where else are you applying?
You don’t get CAPed if you are in the top 7%. You will be admitted to UT but it will be highly unlikely to be accepted to engineering. You will probably be asked to pick a major from what is open at the end. If you want to study engineering, your best bet is to apply to other state schools. Many do have good engineering programs - Texas Tech, UTD, UTA, UH.
What is the CAP program? Also, I would really like to attend UT Austin for engineering, so if the only thing that is preventing me from getting in is my ACT score then I can definitely study and get a higher score.
The CAP program is for student’s who don’t get the automatic acceptance. They are offered a spot at UT in COLA only if they spend 1 year at a different UT campus and can maintain a certain GPA. To get accepted to engineering you need a higher ACT score with trying to get the math as high as possible. Per ASEE, the 75%/25% scores were a composite 34/30 and the math score 35/30. http://profiles.asee.org/profiles/7365/screen/19?school_name=The+University+of+Texas+at+Austin