Okay guys I’m a little nervous as college apps move forward and I feel like I’m just sitting on my hands. I’m white and I go to a small international prep school but am a domestic applicant. I’m a prospective public policy/government major with a focus on environmental policy, and I applied to Wellesley, Trinity, and Notre Dame through the QuestBridge program. I applied to Harvard through the CommonApp.
Superscored SAT: 2030
ACT: 30
Lit Subject Test: 760
GPA: 3.55
I’m especially nervous about this – my school practices serious grade deflation (like, hasn’t had a 4.0 in 6 years serious) and even though we inform colleges of this and kids do get accepted into really good schools, I’m scared they’ll overlook that part of my app. We also don’t do class rank to prove to them how deflated the grades are.
Schedule: Full IB Diploma for the past two years,
Standard Levels: Film, Math, French
Higher Levels: Chemistry, English, History
Special Circumstances: I missed essentially all of my sophomore year due to legitimate reasons, moved onto junior year full IB Diploma having missed almost every day of school and having never taken a pre-IB class (everyone else in Diploma had done a full pre-IB schedule). I’ve been 3 different high schools (switching freshman, sophomore, and junior years). I have a 4 hour roundtrip daily commute so I can attend a better high school. I am from a low-income background and have experienced serious economic hardship my whole life. This has all been explained in various essays and additional info sections.
ECs: Captain of Varsity Crew team, varsity lacrosse player, captain of Model UN, captain of Mock Trial, Claredon House prefect (basically a student gov rep), spent past 3 summers working full time to help my family pay bills, volunteer ESL tutor in inner-city neighborhood
Research: 21 page independent chemistry research study on toxins leeched by plastics
Honors/Awards: Twice won Best Delegate Awards from MIT’s Model UN, won Boston Regional Model UN’s Best Delegate and Best Position Paper, won state honor as James T. Otis Scholar from the American Board of Trial Advocates, selected regionally to be in a 12-person honors poetry class taught by a Nobel Prize winning poetry critic, QuestBridge College Prep Scholar and National College Match Finalist.
Thank you all so much, and I’m really sorry about this - I hope you can give me an idea!