Hi everyone, I go to a public school in the Dallas, TX area.
I have aspirations of going to high caliber schools and would just like a realistic evaluation of my chances.
Here’s my info:
Personal: High income family, Asian Male
GPA: 4.0
Rank: 3/508
SAT: took once in January for an application, 1480 (680 Reading & Writing, 800 math) will take again
SAT Subject: Math II 800, World History 750
ACT: Haven’t taken yet
Class rigor: All honors/ AP classes (14 projected by the end of senior year)
Extracurriculars/Activities
-DECA: International qualifier, chapter officer, district president
-App Developer: Developed some apps on the app store, a website, and interned at local startups
-Business: Owner of a small company with no real revenue, participated in startup incubator, received small funding
-Ac Dec: Team member
-Clubs: NHS, NSHS, NTHS, Mu Alpha Theta (officer), Math Club (founder), Computer Science club, Interact (volunteering) StuCo, and some others
-Participated in Stanford Summer PreCollegiate Institutes
-Piano for 10+ years, local competitions
-Rec sports (more of a joke)
Right now, it looks like your biggest weak link is your standardized test scores - definitely retake the SAT and take the ACT. Your SAT subject test scores are quite good though! Congratulations on having such a rigorous academic schedule - you’re clearly a strong student. I think the app development and business extracurriculars are the ones that most stand out, so I would focus on those and expand upon them more, but you do have a well-rounded set of extracurriculars (music, leadership, tech, and athletics). Make sure your essays are strong and work on those test scores and I expect that if those are strong enough, you’ll have as good a shot at the top schools as anyone. Good luck!
@foyffqbb I’d shoot for 1500+ SAT and try the ACT once, it may surprise you.
Good rigor, GPA, Class rank.
Your ECs seem too spread out, I’m not getting a sense of who you are. Maybe you are doing too much average stuff, and if you cut back, you can go more in-depth into fewer ECs? Elites want quality over quantity. They want world changers, not members.
Agree business, DECA and app work is your strong point, but what have you done that will allow you to stand out from all the other awesome candidates that are also in DECA, have made an App, etc. what is your unique narrative?
High income male Asian is not doing you any favors unfortunately.
You have great chances. Just increase your SAT Reading, but don’t study for math. Most schools superscore, so if you get reading to a 750 or so, your chances skyrocket. Your EC’s and grades are great, just make sure to highlight that in your college app.
Just a few questions though, out of curiosity as a fellow app developer. What programming languages do you work with on a daily basis? Make sure to @collegeboundprogrammer to make sure I get the notification.
Is your major computer science or engineering? If so, I’d actually consider other schools that are stronger than the ivies - MIT, Cal Tech, CMU, Berkeley, Michigan. Also being Asian is an ORM so that will work against you at a lot of those schools but not at the schools I mentioned. Those five along with Stanford are the best engineering and comp sci schools in the country. That being said, your chances are really low at HYPS, like lottery-esque odds. Dartmouth and Brown a little higher but you have to apply ED, which I wouldn’t recommend. You have a better chance at Cornell and Penn and they’re better in engineering so I’d keep those two.
What an above poster said was correct: you want to have depth in your ECs rather than breadth. You need a “spike” in your application, otherwise an unhooked applicant like yourself could maybe not get accepted at an Ivy. I see that you have a connection in business ECs (DECA, app, your small business) so I would focus on pursuing each of these and really making them amazing. You want to build an app with 1000+ downloads that has a helpful purpose or is entertaining. You also want your company to be either highly profitable or successful in the sense that it positively affects people