<p>I'm a senior planning to major in Computer Science in College. Could you give me an idea of my chances for my three reach schools (MIT, CMU, Princeton)? </p>
<p>Background:
Gender/Ethnicity: White, Male
School: Public High School in Maryland, generally gets 3-5 people/year going to top schools, </p>
<p>Academics:
SAT's: 2290 (800 CR, 740 Math, 750 Writing)
Subject Tests: Math II (790), Physics (760)
GPA: 4.4035 Weighted, 3.9649 (Got a B in AP US History)
Class Rank: 17/376
AP's: US History (4), World History (4), Physics B (4), Statistics (4); currently taking Calc AB and BC, English Literature, and French</p>
<p>Activities:</p>
<p>Marching Band for 4 years (Baritone Section Leader)
Speech and Debate for 4 years (made state finals last year, took first place at a few tournaments this year)
Boy Scouts since 6th grade (cub scouts before that): Life Scout, almost Eagle (I finished my project), served 2 terms as Senior Patrol Leader
Academic Challenge Team (basically a type of quiz bowl; we compete with other schools in the county) since 10th grade
All-County Band 8th, 10th, and 11th grade
Latin Club since 10th grade
French Club all four years
National Honor Society since 11th grade</p>
<p>Awards: AP Scholar With Honor, National Merit Commended, Maxima Cum Laude award for National Latin Exam, Scholastic Letter</p>
<p>You’re a strong applicant. Scores and GPA are good. Class rank is decent.</p>
<p>EC’s are by themselves strong but aren’t very cohesive. Not necessarily a bad thing, but be sure to demonstrate passion in your app. </p>
<p>I think you’re almost certainly in at CMU. Princeton is still a crapshoot. The 4 on the Physics AP and the fact that you don’t really have any science-related EC’s will hurt for MIT.</p>
<p>You definitely have the grades and scores for all 3. Your ECs are a little lackluster, though. They’re nice for sure, but a bit run-of-the-mill for top schools.<br>
CMU and MIT’s departments are really on equal ground for CS, but MIT is probably a bit harder just because it’s MIT. Princeton is hard as ever. </p>
<p>High reach: MIT
Reach: Princeton
Low reach: CMU</p>
<p>Actually CMU SCS is the hardest school to get into. Since CMU does admissions by school, OP’s chances are practically the same for MIT and CMU because of how competitive CS is. Acceptance rate last year for MIT was about 8.9% while acceptance rate for CMU SCS was about 8.3%. Keep in mind also that some people may have added SCS on their app for the heck of it knowing they would never get in/did not care about CS but rather the prestige of getting in, but I wouldn’t count on too many of those people. If OP applied to any other school at CMU, he would have an easier time getting in. I found MIT’s acceptance rate through google. Here are the admission statistics for CMU and its individual schools: [Carnegie</a> Mellon Admission | Admission Statistics](<a href=“http://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/undergraduate-admission-statistics]Carnegie”>http://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/undergraduate-admission-statistics)</p>
<p>Anyway, OP, your numbers are in the competitive range. However, as others before have said, your ECs are strong separately but sort of all over the place.</p>
<p>None of them are definite, especially since with CMU, you’d have to apply the the School of Computer Science, which has an acceptance rate of about the same as MIT. Of the three you have the best chance at CMU, which I would describe as a moderate to low reach; Princeton and MIT are higher reaches (especially for MIT since your EC’s are more humanities oriented than STEM oriented, and while this might resonate slightly better at Princeton, Princeton’s more selective to start out with).</p>