I stand by the opinion that asking another person to evaluate my chance of acceptance is unwise, but at this point I’m just so nervous that I want to hear something, anything, good or bad to preoccupy myself with for the next eighteen days. I’m desperately hoping for the University of Southern California.
- Caucasian female, hella gay
- 3.75/4.65 GPA, ranked 23/382; after midyear grades, that changed to 3.85/4.72 ranked 17/382
- 28 ACT (33 English, 31 Reading, 23 Math, 23 Science, 29 combined ELA)
- Public high school, average GPA, test scores, and rate of college attendance tend to be on the lower side; enrolled in a specialty center for humanities (kind of like a charter school within the school, my English, social studies and elective courses are different)
Extracurricular:
- LGBTQ Alliance (president and founder, two years)
- Girl Scouts (Gold and Silver award recipient, eleven years)
- Piano (seven years)
- Technical theatre crew (three years for shows twice a year, huge time commitment)
- Key Club (four years, events coordinator for three)
- Model UN (four years)
- French NHS (four years)
- National Honor Society (senior year)
- Campaign volunteer with local democratic headquarters during presidential and gubernatorial elections
Awards:
- Girl Scout Gold Award
- Virginia Girls State
- Virginia Summer Residential Governor’s School for Humanities
- AP Scholar with Distinction
- National Honor Society
- Recommendations: from French and English/humanities teacher: I read the one from my French teacher (she’s taught me for all four years), pretty brief, she praised my compassion and artistic inclination and said I was a hard worker/model partner who made an effort to help and defend others against classmates. She gave me the highest marks possible on the evaluation.
- Essays: There were three typos. For the common app I talked about Governor’s School being a place where I matured emotionally, for USC supplements I talked about how LGBTQ Alliance had become a second family to me/running and founding the club while being closeted to my parents, and detailed in my general USC and Annenberg supplements about specific things for pre-law courses, and how my interest in media advocacy could be fulfilled by student press organizations, research, diversity and location, etc. Also mentioned my middle school experiences having a principal who wouldn’t let me discuss LGBTQ rights in the student newspaper and how that pushed me to work with my school board to revise district bullying/harassment policies so they were queer inclusive. There were minor typos, but I’m a pretty good writer.
- Eleven AP in total; (psych (5), human geo (3), bio (3), art history (3), us history (4), English language (5), currently taking environmental science, statistics, English lit, French language, and government
- All honors in elective and core classes when available, except freshman and sophomore math. I’ve had straight A’s except in math and sophomore chemistry.
- Senior courses: the five AP classes listed plus honors humanities elective and honors 20th century history, straight A’s first semester
- Additional info: discussed having a neurological condition which has basically given me chronic pain/lots of surgeries for most of my life, but that I don’t let it define me, even if it means working twice as hard to come in third place, etc.