Hi,
Here are the unis I’m thinking of applying. My “safety” and “target” schools are mostly some affordable publics and UK/canada ones. These are all reaches then, I suppose. Would really appreciate if given more suggestions (these are modified from replies to a previous, general post)
Priority 1: Caltech, MIT, JHU (doing ED2 here)
Priority 2: Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Northwestern, Williams
Priority 3: Bowdoin, Rice, Swarthmore
Note: “Priority” is just my personal list; has nothing to do with prestige or quality
Intended major: CHEMISTRY/MOLECULAR PHYSICS/GEOCHEMISTRY/(anything physical/inorganic chem)
Profile is basically this:
Demographics: Underrepresented developing south-asian country, male, only child of two surgeons (you could say I’m pretty privileged relative to my own community; not sure if that’s the case with Americans 
)
Academics: Doing my country’s national curriculum and CAIE A Levels together (double the load 
).
Predicted straight A+'s in national curriculum board exam and A*,A*,A*,B in A levels (Phys, Chem, Math and Further Math in that order). Had 90% overall average in 10th grade public exam (95%+ in the relevant sciences and math). (just for quick info: A levels give me college credit, and are generally deemed more rigorous than their AP counterparts) (for straight A+'s in natcurriculum - around 45k kids out of 1.5M every year get A+'s in all SEVEN subjects. A+ is >80% marks)
Attending my country’s most prestigious high school (that itself is super competitive to get in; you gotta do tests and interviews); ranked 57th in class of 2095. Grades are kinda bad though (lots of grade deflation) (ex students at this school get into top unis in my country, and have gone to every Ivy, stanford and around 50+ go to top Canadian unis every year)
SAT: expecting >1500 (december 2020), couldn’t reg for subject tests due to weird reasons. Probably won’t send SAT scores if I score <1500
Awards & ECAs: Several national awards in Olympiads, went to math Olympiad camp (similar to MOP after the USAMO); did a research project in inorganic synthetic chem (that later became best project of the nationwide event from all categories); did an internship on analytical chem by a national institute (had hands-on experience with NMR, IR and other instruments). Most important to me personally though: I’m an amateur chemist (no, no meth cooking); I mean, synthesized real cool stuffs with real glassware and ACS grade chemicals at “home lab” all acquired legally. Will mention this in an entire separate essay ig
Almost made it to the Stockholm Junior water prize team; mentored juniors at school math club for Olympiads; have been spending the quarantine reading pretty advanced books (Atkins’ physical chem, Clayden’s organic chem, Resnick&Halliday, Callister’s materials science to name a few) and learning computational chem (Spartan, PyMOL) and coding (Python, Fortran, LaTeX)
Volunteered once in my school science fair… Not much community service or NGO stuffs tbh. I lack this “well-rounded” feature, so please suggest some of the “less holistic” colleges that focus more on relevant activities (i.e. related to major or STEM)
Essays, LORs etc: Essays look just “good” to me, but the more “philosophical” ones like community/identity might be bad (no compelling stories to write etc). LORs will come from a really familiar language teacher, chem teacher and research/internship supervisors (which I suppose should be nice). How important are LORs though?
FINANCIAL AID: Can afford around 55k, so some aid would definitely be necessary. I wrote a larger sum in previous post by mistake 
Another thing though: how is my amateur chemistry thing viewed in college applications? Didn’t do anything legal or dangerous (just random perfume/pigment syntheses), plus it isn’t associated with meth in my country (people tag you as nerds doing stinky science experiments lol)
Sorry for the long read. Happy chanceme!