High School stats:
Private, Christian competitive high school in Milwaukee
Class Rank: Bottom 25%
GPA: 2.3 GPA (Upward trend from 1.5 freshman year and sophomore year)
IEP for Autism (Highly functioning)
Low income family
1 year of FTC and FRC Robotics plus a part time job at a grocery store where I’m a manager. (EC’s)
1030 PSAT (65th Percentile)
hopefully 21-24 ACT and I plan to retake it a few times until I get a 28 or 29
Failed a class during my 1st semester of sophomore year
Prospective Major: CS (Game Dev)
I plan to apply to UWM (Safety/Reach), UW Madison (Miracle if I got in), USC (Want to let them know that I’m interested and they said that they’ll help me form a transfer plan.
IK that I don’t have any realistic chance to get into 4 year schools but I have strong essays and I’m curious about any decent CS programs that I’d have a chance at attending. I hope to work in FAANG software engineering as a career with game development (Minecraft or xbox at Microsoft)
Anyone please help suggest? @Gumbymom @DadTwoGirls
USC is really not my area of expertise but I have linked the 2020 Transfer profile. With your GPA alone, it will be a High Reach.
@Gumbymom Thanks for the advice! Do you know of anyone that can help me with this? I’m considering attending community college first then doing a CS transfer. What are the transfer scholarships like?
We live way to the east of you so I am not completely sure. However, to me UW Madison and USC (assuming you mean Southern California) are high reaches. Your chances at UW Milwaukee I do not know, and this might depend upon how much of an uptrend you have.
Your best bet is to do the best that you can for your junior and senior years of high school, and see what happens. Focus on getting good grades in your classes and thereby pulling up your GPA. You can apply to UW Milwaukee and see if you get in. If not you can start at community college and apply to transfer. Being in-state should help with the transfer.
I do not know what UW Milwaukee does. However, I have seen a few students who had strong uptrends applying to different universities where the universities waited for at least first semester senior year grades before making a decision. The schools wanted to see if the uptrend continued. Also, if you start at community college and then transfer, your senior year grades will matter.
There is nothing wrong with starting at community college for a year or two and then transferring. I know two strong students who did exactly this. One was because they too had at least two bad years at the start of high school (they only became a strong student near the end of high school). The other was for financial reasons. Both ended up doing very well (one who is older than me became a professor, one who is a daughter’s age will be graduating from a good university with a useful degree in a bit over two months from now).
It definitely is possible to overcome bad grades from the first two years of high school. The key is to start doing well in your classes now, and understand that it will take a bit of time and effort to get where you want to go.
I would definitely try to raise your test scores