SAT: 1520
Math 2: 800, Physics: 740
GPA: Around 3.5-3.6
International applicant
To the accepted applicants: CONGRATS GUYS, WE MADE IT.
To the waitlisted and rejected applicants: It’s okay to feel bad for a few days and then move on with your lives. Keep doing what you love and maybe transfer to Gatech later.
To future applicants: Be passionate about what you do. You don’t have to win an award to show that you are passionate about or committed to something (winning awards is no doubt awesome though ^^). Try your best to help those around you and strive to see people you don’t like/fear under a new light. IMPORTANT: make sure your counselors/teachers know about your passion so they can help you pursue it/ refer to it in your recs.
GATech has published the overall acceptance rate as 23% and EA acceptance rate as 28%. They haven’t published the acceptance rate for just RD round. I think we can deduce that though.
Based on GATech publications, a total of 7,297 students admitted across EA and Regular from a pool of 31,484 applicants. In EA, there were 4380 admits out of 15,715 applicants (~28% acceptance rate). Some fraction of 15,715 students were deferred to RD. GA Tech has not published that number to best of my knowledge.
To find the acceptance rate for RD round, we need the number students accepted during RD and total numbers of applicants considered in RD, which includes the deferrals from EA. The number of admits in RD is 2917 (7297 total admits - 4380 admits in EA). GATech admissions tweeted that 20,000 application decisions are being released on March 11. If you interpret that as the size of the total RD applicant pool, the RD admit rate is 2,917/20,000 = 14.5%.
Also, if RD admit pool size is 20,000, they deferred 4,321 applicants from EA since they got 15,769 (31484 overall - 15715 from EA) new applications for RD.
GATech is moving up the selective admissions chain.
Being deferred EA, I felt down but I never gave up. Anyone waitlisted or denied, the ball is entirely in your court. Make the best decision regarding the colleges you have been accepted to and continue to have hope for the ones you’re still waiting on. I suggest everyone, no matter their admission decision, read Tech’s last admissions blog post. Really puts things into perspective.
Stats
Residency: In-State
GPA: 4.0 (Unweighted)
Class Rank: Top 5%
Courses: 14 IB’s (IB Spanish - 6), AP Spanish (5), IB Diploma Candidate
SAT: 1380
ACT: 29
ECs: Beta Club President, Former Secretary of National Honor Society, CFA Leader Academy Fundraising Coordinator, Heavily active in Theatre, Georgia GHP Finalist in Spanish, County Leaadership Program
Awards: Several Spanish awards/honors, GA Certificate of Merit, 2nd Place in Talent Show
Volunteer Work: Vivien Thomas Summer Program Researcher at Morehouse School of Medicine, Grady Memorial Hospital Summer Volunteer
Work experience: Aeropostale Employee
Letter of Rec: My Spanish teacher who I am very close with recommended me. She knows a lot about me and personalized it well.
Essay: Revised the grammar and style several times. I generally am a good writer, so it was good but not great.
Additional comments: I am a Black male, and I’m not going for athletics so that was pretty shocking. Many Caucasians and Asians attend Tech. After being deferred, I wrote my regional admissions counselor for why I was deferred and what I should include in my deferral form. I did as much research & digging in my records as possible to create a really good form. I really believe doing this put me an extra step ahead.
Objective:
SAT- 2200 (Super- 730 W, 800 M, 670 CR)
SAT II- 760 Chem, 800 Bio, 790 Math II
GPA Unweighted- 3.71
GPA Weighted- 4.01
Rank- N/A
AP Scores- Calculus AB (5), Euro (4), AP Bio (4), APUSH (4), Lang (5), Psych (5)
Senior year courseload- AP Lit, AP Chem, AP Calc BC, AP Stats, Advanced Research in Synthetic Biology, Honors String Orchestra
Major awards- meh… AP Scholar with Distinction, Honor Roll, WFA Certification
Subjective:
Extracurricular- Varsity Cross Country, Stu-Gov, iGEM, Environment Club Co-Founder
Job/Work experience- Infectious Diseases Lab Intern
Volunteer- Thailand Health Service Trip
Essays- I had a good Common App essay but the supplements I kind of winged.
Teacher recommendations- Don’t know… I waived my FERPA rights. I got an A+ in my psych class and I got my psych teacher to write one of my recs- maybe it was pretty good. The other was written by my senior year AP Lit teacher- I’m a decent student in his class (A-) but I’m not his most brilliant.
Counselor recommendation- Don’t know… I waived my FERPA rights.
Country- Taiwan
Ethnicity- Taiwanese-American
Gender- Male
Reasons I think I got waitlisted- Not showing enough interest in the school, being a mundane application, international student
@GaussPi100 : Are they? They pretty much employed the same strategies to get more applications as other schools that saw very sudden increases in the number of applications such as when WUSTL did it, Chicago did it, Vanderbilt did it, even Johns Hopkins did it. This seems to be a trick to quickly boost selectivity that many schools have resorted to and it always works. These schools were not suddenly much more selective and popular before the admissions office came up with super common strategies (like making essays easier/generic to non-existent and spamming applicants). It is effective, but pretty much any school that was suddenly in certain selectivity categories can employ these methods. Some chose to, some didn’t. It also seems that USNWR has caught on to it and the stats whoring (schools going this route seem to have much more numbers based admissions despite claiming to be holistic. They pretty much are aiming for the highest stats within reason that they can yield. And it partially works because students are applying to multiple selective schools so if those high stats students are denied from those, you can catch them) it leads said schools to do and it looks as if USNWR is not rewarding schools as much for sudden large decreases in admit rate and increases in SAT/ACT range. Basically, they look to see if other metrics are changing to match the change in admissions trends (are graduation rates dramatically improving, did endowment increase dramatically, are faculty salaries higher). This method has its limitations in terms of raising actual prestige and boosting the actual quality of the students (like my alma mater across town has been flat score wise, yet its students are apparently as capable as schools with 100 or more points higher on the SAT range, outperforming or tieing them in terms of prestigious post-graduate fellowships and scholarships. 2 of the aforementioned schools above have been using this scheme for about a decade and have pushed SATs up maybe around 100 points but have seen no return in the post-grad success area from the cohorts with the super high stats yet which suggest that the school did not change with the student body or that the new student body mainly just tested better and, other than that, were not fundamentally different from before) but I suppose it makes alumni and newly minted admits feel good about themselves. Looking at my watch figuring out when Emory will just give in and start using the same method.
Also, Tech is aiming too high in its admissions. It appears its return is a bit worse than Emory score wise (I compare them because the student body caliber is very similar). Like when you aim for a 1458 but get a 1380-1390 out of it. Emory typically aims for a 1400 or so and gets a 1365-1375 out of it. Most schools will not yield the caliber they admitted, but sometimes too much stats whoring is just too much and isn’t really worth the effort because again, the other qualities of the students that you yield may ultimately remain the same. Meaning that within the 3-5 year period that the method is employed, faculty may see no or very little differences. There was a VU article on whether or not the students were actually much smarter and of course the STEM faculty commented that they used the same level exams as they did a decade or more ago and saw the same performance. So maybe, for already very selective schools (with beyond 1300-1350 averages), further increases in stats and GPA have little translation to performance on non-multiple choice STEM exams at these elite publics and privates. Better to exploit academic competition, SAT2, AP performances? Also, better to spend time optimizing academics and academic culture at the schools first (like the fact that many instructors do not change the caliber of their courses even when statistics increase dramatically,means that they do not care that much or simply don’t trust that the students are that much more well prepared).
But again, all these maneuvers selective colleges play is mainly for the superficial aspects of prestige and has little to do with what they need to do to actually become higher caliber institutions overall. I am actually happy to say that GT is one of the schools that does care much more about the latter. It does more than brag about improved admissions statistics and instead presents its level of impact and what folks at Tech do.
ECs: Captain of Robotics Team, Choir Section Leader (with Carnegie Hall performance), NHS, Mu Alpha Theta, Key Club, Class President, Vice-President of FBLA, private piano lessons, etc.
Work Experience: Research intern in Materials Science and Engineering Dept. at University of Alabama over summer
Awards: AP Scholar w/ Distinction
Hooks: African-American male
Recommendations: Counselor loves me, we’ve been in touch since my freshman year, so I can assume it was pretty good.
Essays: Wrote about how I want to help develop interstellar transport for the long one. I wrote about my potential involvement in GT’s Space Systems Design Lab in the one of the others.
Reasons I believe I got accepted: showed lots of interest, interesting essay
And last but not least:
Turning down offer for Auburn University which is in-state for me. (Will apply to GT again for grad school.) Congrats to all those accepted. For those deferred or rejected: this does not define you, pursue what you want to do relentlessly and success will likely come later.
Guys, I was wondering if anybody knows why is Georgia Tech so much cheaper compared to other universities (38k compared to 60k-70k+ ). I am an international student and don’t rly know what are those fees based mostly on in US
@valodik Cheaper? GT is a public university (not private) and is partially supported by state and federal appropriations . GT’s out of state tuition/fee’s is about $33K a year (cost of attendance would be closer to $49K a year). GT’s out of state cost are inline with most other publics, lower than the California schools (UC’s) but a bit higher than most in the Southeastern part of the US.
Of course, private colleges (with comparable engineering programs) will have much higher “sticker” cost than GT. However, many of these privates would offer better merit and need-based financial aid to out of state students. For that reason, a school like Cornell, with a $52K+ tuition per year rate, may or may not end up being cheaper than GT for out of state/international students.
If you’re a full pay international student (who wouldn’t qualify for any financial aid), then GT’s a good cost, versus comparable engineering schools.
@Gator88NE Thx. Is attendance cost rly that much bigger than the fee? So for instance, if a student gets a full scholarship they still need to be able to afford the $16k??
maybe Georgia tech was meant for me. Also have Berkeley but unfortunately can’t afford it.