Right now I’m a freshman at a pretty good private school. I have a 4.2 gpa out of a 4.5 scale and got a 1250 on the psat, with a 700 on reading and writing and 550 on math (obviously I need to work on this). I’m not taking any AP or honors courses this year but plan on taking AP history next year and maybe an AP English course (my school’s weird about AP being available to lower classmen though). As far as extracurriculars go I do theatre and volunteer at an observatory, and I’m also in a few clubs at school, namely astronomy, gsa, Russian, and creative writing. Middlebury has really high standards, and I would need decent financial aid to be able to go, so I’m worried that I won’t be accepted.
You are only a freshman, and there is a long way to go before you are applying to colleges. There are a LOT of very good small/moderate sized colleges. Middlebury is a great school, but so are many, many other schools.
I would suggest that you keep up the good work at high school, participate in ECs that you enjoy, and when the time comes apply to multiple schools and see what works at the time.
I might add that Middlebury can be expensive. When the time comes to apply to colleges you will need to take the cost into consideration. I don’t think that you need to worry too much about being accepted, for the simple reason that there are so many other very good alternatives and the stats that you have put together so far suggest that you will have some very good options.
Thank you! I’ll try to keep that in mind
If you keep your GPA to close-to-perfect while taking many AP classes, and if you can significantly improve your SAT math, then you will be within the range of what an ultra-competitive school like Middlebury is looking for. And even then, all that does is give you a less-than-great chance to get in. Hamilton College is comparable to Middlebury – check out the standardized testing distribution of scores on the Hamilton website. The chance of getting in with SAT scores at or over 1500 is 53%. At your current scores, the chance is 9%, and I would bet those few acceptances (33 out of 372) had special circumstances. So even if you get your scores up to 1500, your chance would only be about 50-50. But that is better than 9%.