<p>well, i was wondering what my chances are to W&M. To be frank, i'm probably not your average TWAMP, but i have fallen in love with W&M. This school has everything i want from classes, NROTC program, and is situated where i can emerse myself in history (i'm a big history nerd). I'm going to be a senior in a catholic high school that has a lot of prestige in my state, by the way i'm from NY, but my grades are not the best in the world. My average is about 83-86, i'm re-taking my SAT, i have a lot of EC's and local work, i also have a lot of experiences abroad that i'm sure most people haven't had. I definitely will opt to take the interview at W&M because it'll give me a chance to add more of my self into my application. Any helpful advice and tips to strengthen my application would be greatly appreciated. Also if anyone can answer this for me, does ED help my chances of getting in?</p>
<p>Sounds like you’re currently a junior so you have plenty of time to make yourself as competitive as possible.</p>
<p>One thing to think about is your course selection. If your school offers advanced courses (AP for example), wade into them in 11th grade and then take a solid number in 12th. Strive for calc, physics and the fourth level of a single foreign language as culminating courses. We look for these courses on a transcript.</p>
<p>Without knowing more about your school and its grading scale it’s hard to assess your GPA (W&M doesn’t even have an average GPA). However, most of the students we admit graduate in the top 10% of their high school class and have mostly As on their transcript if that helps.</p>
<p>As for your time abroad, we actually do get a lot of students who have had experiences abroad. We absolutely appreciate those experiences but feel free to elaborate more on those in this forum and we can guide you as to whether they make for a more typical essay topic or not.</p>
<p>Applying ED can help you in that the pool is much smaller so it’s easier for any applicant to stand out. Applying ED won’t make a non-competitive applicant competitive but again it does allow students to shine more given the smaller pool size.</p>
<p>For more on our process and any applicant’s chances, check out our Admit It! Blog ([W&M</a> Blogs Chance Me](<a href=“http://blogs.wm.edu/2010/12/14/chance-me/]W&M”>http://blogs.wm.edu/2010/12/14/chance-me/))</p>
<p>actually i’m going into senior year</p>
<p>my school doesn’t give class rank as it has hurt our students in the college application process, as a matter of fact they divulge very little about our stance among our classmates.</p>
<p>Also i was wondering how much does W&M take the interview into account?</p>
<p>and as for sharing my experiences, you mean here?</p>
<p>Got it. Well again, without knowing more about your school and its grading system/scale it’s hard to assess your GPA (again W&M doesn’t have a GPA merely because GPA is a very school-specific thing and needs school context to be truly understood). If your high school doesn’t rank that’s fine. We look at the grades behind the GPA and we like to see As and Bs (hopefully more As than Bs).</p>
<p>The interview is one factor of many but is entirely optional. It’s intended to allow students to put their personality into the application. We consider it akin to a letter of recommendation (these are also optional beyond the required one from your counselor) but it’s from a person who knows this campus and is very well equipped to assess how someone might add to our campus community. Only 20% of our applicants interview so it’s certainly not required.</p>
<p>And yes, we meant that if you’d like, you can share more about your abroad experience in this forum and we can tell you if it’s a commonplace essay topic or not.</p>