Hello everyone! I am an overzealous junior in HS and have recently taken to directing a portion of my daily stress quota towards college applications for next year. I am an aspiring electrical/mechanical engineer and would be elated to attend Northwestern, Notre Dame, or Princeton (or others of the same caliber). I would love input on my chances or advice on how I should proceed to be as competitive as possible. My stats are as follows:
Gender: Male
Ethnicity: White
Grade: Junior (11)
School: Public; ranked #34 in state; ranked #743 in nation
Graduating class: ~480 students
GPA: 4.0 (unweighted); 4.47 (weighted)
Rank: my school doesn’t rank (too competitive), but I am in the top 5% of my graduating class.
Course difficulty: AP Human Geography (freshman year); AP European History (sophomore year); AP English Language, AP Physics, AP US History (sophomore year); will have completed four years of German and four years of Project Lead the Way (Engineering), which were unweighted the first two years and changed to honors weight my junior year, by graduation; the rest of my course load is comprised of every available honors course and the occasional, obligatory standard class; and I am currently planning on taking an additional 6 APs my senior year, and have enrolled in virtually every applicable AP class that my school offers (although my school offers 26 APs in total).
ACT: 34 composite (33 math and reading, 34 grammar, and 35 science)–taken once
SAT: 1530 (760 writing, 770 math, and 20 essay)–taken once
SAT II: I am currently planning on taking the Math II and Physics subject tests.
Extracurricular: Fellowship of Christian Students (freshman-present), Soccer (only my freshman year), Math Team (sophomore-present), German National Honor Society (sophomore-present), National Honor Society (junior-present), Social Studies National Honor Society (junior-present), and Varsity Track and Field (junior year-present).
Leadership: FCS vice president (junior year), FCS president (senior year), and NHS vice president (senior year).
The WOW (I have read that top tier colleges want to see specific activities that set the applicant apart from the rest of the pool): 14 years involved in Taekwondo (competitions, leadership, and continued dedication) and my Internship at a local engineering company (it was set up through the school for first semester and I was offered a paid position for this upcoming summer).
Awards: a few miscellaneous school awards, nothing special.
Essays: not to be boastful, but I would consider myself a pretty good writer and I have some great ideas for the essay prompts.
Recommendation letters: I am definitely a teacher’s pet and repeatedly build amazing student-teacher relations in every class. I feel as though this will be another strength of my application and the only real difficulty will be deciding who to ask.
So what are your thoughts, am I competitive? Is there anything I can do or emphasize to better my chances? Or other schools I should consider? I am considering taking my standardized tests again to see if I can improve with dedicated study time. Thanks for your time and consideration!
A competitive applicant, except everyone else applying to those schools are competitive. No one here can tell you whether or not you will get it.
You have a shot at the t20s, I think. But it’s never a guarantee.
It seems like you’re doing the right things. Since you want to be an engineer, obviously your grades/test scores will matter very much in admissions. Your ACT/SAT scores are high enough for non-engineering applicants, but I would advise you to retake them if you can get a higher score to be more competitive. Many accepted engineer majors I have met at top 10-20 schools have near perfect scores. Did you take Calculus? I would advise taking AP Physics C if you haven’t already. In terms of extracurriculars, you seem qualified enough to have a shot. I can’t judge how appealing they are to admissions officers, though, since every case is different. I agree with the posters above on how unless you have world-class achievements any top school is never a guarantee. Besides Northwestern, Notre Dame, and Princeton, you can consider other similar schools like UC Berkeley, UCLA, Duke, Columbia, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, U Illinois Urbana-Champaign, UT Austin, U Michigan Ann Arbor, Cornell, U Penn, Rice, Johns Hopkins, etc. They all have amazing engineering programs. I would also apply to schools like Stanford, Harvard, Caltech, and MIT just for the sake of doing it. You never know.
Yeah. You’re clearly an accomplished student, and if I had to bet on it, I think you’ll get into one of the T20s…Cornell, UC Berkeley, Rice, and Johns Hopkins all seem like very live options. But make sure to have a viable safety if it doesn’t happen!
What’s your financial situation? You may have to custom tailor your list to suit your needs for aid or merit. Some of the top engineering schools may have generous aid, good merit scholarships, both or neither. Let’s say if you are low income, high need, Harvard, Stanford, MIT may work better but with high income you should focus on Rice, Duke, Northwestern and other schools with merit money. If you are really wealthy then you should ignore cost and look for best fit.
Thank you for all your input! I really appreciate it. Everyone’s school suggestions are also very helpful.
@Riversider My family is by no means exuberantly wealthy, however, tuition cost is not a major concern of mine. Relatively speaking, I will be alright financially.
I plan to take AP Calculus BC my senior year. @peach0v0 Would taking AP Physics C be more advantageous than AP Physics II? Thank you for your input on the SAT/ACT as well. I will sign up to take them again to try to get to that near perfect standard.
@TheSATTeacher I have received 5s on all of my AP exams thus far and expect to see this trend continue. Thank you for your input on my “wows.” Do you think my internship alone is sufficient to set me apart? And I will be sure to look into resources on the essay writing (I wasn’t even aware there was such a thing!).
@MFR072 AP Physics C: Mechanics and AP Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism are calculus-based and will be much harder than AP Physics II, which is still algebra-based. Thus, if you can handle it, AP Physics C courses will look stronger.
Without finances to worry about, you can be more flexible in crafting a good list. You are competitive but as you aren’t low income, first generation, right minority, legacy, donor, recruit able athlete or z lister, consider improving your odds with an early decision application to your top choice other than HYPSM.