New to CC, and it feels a little crass for me to do, it feels at alternate times braggy and self effacing in a pretty lame way, but as far as I can tell its what this forum is for. I’m suddenly overcome with like vague directionless white knuckle anxiety about all of this, so this is part of my effort to deal with that.
Applying to: Brown, Cornell, Harvard, NYU, Chicago, Oberlin
College GPA: 3.89
HS GPA: honestly i don’t know. Its been surprisingly hard to track down. I did terribly the first few years of HS, then rose to a steady average of As and a few Bs. Mostly AP classes by senior year. Took six AP courses.
SATs: 2230 (780 reading, 780 writing, 670 math)
SAT IIs: 780 US history, 730 lit
ECs: published writer of both fiction and non-fiction, including in literary magazines and in The Boston Globe. Started and now serve as prose editor for my own literary magazine. Also, lived alone in a wigwam in the forest in the Adirondacks for four months during my year off, for what its worth. Sorta an into the wild type thing, but less annoying, and with a better ending.
Awards: won a scholarship for creative writing. Other than that not much.
Employment: various minimum wage summer jobs, internship writing for a lab at MIT.
Recs & essays: I have yet to get recommendations or write essays, but I have asked two professors that I have very good relationships with for recommendations and they’ve agreed, and I can only hope that their recs will be good to glowing. The essay, which i’ve just started, is on living in the woods and discovering literature there, alluding to the depression I suffered from early in HS to at least give some sort of explanation for my grades freshman and sophomore year. I have a lot of experience writing, so I think the essays should be good.
Legacy to Harvard
One note: I have good college grades, but they’re exclusively in liberal arts classes. Do you think I should branch out at the risk of lowering my GPA, or stay the course and hope for a more focused applicaioin?
Thanks.