<p>Ok so I was just rejected from Stanford REA and am pretty bummed that I didn't even get deferred. I feel like I could've written better essays and am hiring a college counselor to help me with the HYP essays but I'm not sure if it's worth the time and money when I could be focusing on solidifying my status at the next tier of schools.
SAT: Not taken
ACT: 34
SAT II's: 710 Chem and 720 Lit
GPA: 3.86/4.25 UW/W
Class Rank: 19th out of 619
11 AP courses and 6 honors
AP Scores: Comp and World (5), Chem bio us history and psych (4)</p>
<p>EC:
Mock Trial: Highest individual honor in the county and two time MVP
Soccer: Nationally ranked team and varsity letter
Science Olympiad: 3rd and 5th in the state in individual events
Robotics: Top 20 in the state as a team and I'm the PR Director, Captain of scouting, and an Executive on the team
Key Club: Service coordinator for ten schools and 500 students
Special Education Department at school: 75 hours playing sports with students
Children's Hospital 150 hours of volunteering (wrote my common app essay on the experience of a patient I befriended dying)
Director and founder of the first futsal (an indoor soccer variation) tournament for high school students that raised money for my under-funded soccer program at school
Work Experience: 4 years of reffing youth soccer and promoted to the highest possible level given my age</p>
<p>Essays: I've written my Harvard essay and I thought it was great and my common app one is stellar according to my teachers</p>
<p>letters of Rec: I think this is my major weakness cause I go to a big public high school so my teachers love me but they have to write like 35-40 letters and they start to just plug stuff into a template unfortunately. I have one from the volunteer coordinator at Children's Hospital that I assume is fantastic cause she has a master's degree and loves me and another from my boss from refereeing that praises me highly but is poorly written. My counselor rec is probably great cause I'm one of her fav students.</p>
<p>Anyways, be honest because if it's not realistic for me to get into one of those schools I'll refocus on my other ones.
Thanks!</p>
<p>I also have a couple leadership awards where I was picked as best student on campus kind of thing </p>
<p>Hey so your ec’s are ok the rec letters are somewhat of a problem but those are not huge. To me there are 2 big things 1 is why is you weighted GPA higher if you took all those weighted classes and 2 for any school like Stanford or hyp many have great GPAs, test scores, and ec’s. Your essay must be fantastic as well. That being said you should
1 make sure future essays are much stronger
2 you should’ve taken the sat
3 you unweighted GPA is ok but 4.2 is a low weighted GPA
The rec letters are a minor problem that are not really in your control so I would worry about these things if you can’t handle them then maybe try for 2 or so ivy level schools(the lower ivy’s) but I wouldn’t spend much more time than that</p>
<p>ok thanks and I don’t know how different schools calculate GPA because no one at my school hits above a 4.35 so a 4.25 is solid I thought. I was told by my college counselor that they don’t care if you submit Act or SAT… and yeah I’m working on my essays.</p>
<p>and my harvard supplement that I wrote brought my english teacher to tears so I think it’s a step in the right direction</p>
<p>Letter of reccomendations are extremely important, especially for Harvard. In my honest opinion, unless you’re a minority, you’re wasting your time applying to HYP. Instead I would focus on some more realistic reach school like UPenn, Cornell, Duke, Brown, etc. What are you trying to major in? You’re EC’s make me want to say Engineering and if that’s the case Cornell actually has the best engineering school among the Ivy leagues (besides maybe Princeton). Cornell’s engineering acceptance is 9% overall though.</p>
<p>poly sci or econ. I was told by my counselor and teachers that the schools were a reach but not a waste of time to apply to but I think in context I agree with you. i’m going to see what my college counselor says but I appreciate the input. I am applying to U Penn and duke as well as the other Ivy’s in all likelihood. Thanks!</p>
<p>five b’s in high school and each AP is on a 5 point scale and every honor and regular class is on a 4 point scale. I’m sending in at least three strong letters of rec I think and the fourth one is decent so I don’t think it’ll hurt my app very much. Anyways, thanks for the advice :)</p>
<p>My UC GPA is 4.4 which is what a lot of people refer to I think</p>
<p>@soccerboy10 sending in additional letter of recs and documents isn’t reccomended by schools. Anyways look in to each schools particular department. What I liked about Cornell’s economics is that it allows for a lot of flexibility, I can take classes at AEM to learn some practice skills. Also if I decide that economics isn’t for me, I can probably transfer to AEM if my grades are high enough.</p>
<p>I’m not sending extra recs, I was referring to the ones that I am sending in as part of the common app. That’s cool and yeah I’m definitely considering Cornell. </p>