I am a freshman. I attend a high school called the STEM Academy, out of state in pennsylvania. The name stands for Science Technology Engineering and Math Academy. This is a highschool the kids that were supposed to go to the local east and west high schools would’ve been attending if not applying to stem. About 500 kids apply to stem, and about 200 of us are accepted in. All of our classes are honors classses and there are not many encores. I take computer programming for an encore where most students take an art class or revision. I have decent grades, about even with a’s and b’s and I am worried about my chances of getting into these colleges for a couple of reasons. First off, the teachers at my school have a goal to prepare us for college, although I feel like this is hurting us. Sometimes they will give the whole class low scores on something and tell us we all need to do better, and they think that going to stem is going to help us, and us getting b’s doesn’t really matter. Second, class rank. I called the admissions offices of these schools and they said class rank was the most important thing to get into the schools. My school is filled with some of the most hardworking and smart students from the area, and I am not sure I am going to be top 10% or25%. I feel like class rank is really gonna hurt me, and I don’t know if they will see that the kids going to my school are smarter and that’s why I may not be at the top. Finally, I am doing and will be doing track throughout highschool, track for the east high school because my school does not have sports teams. I really want to go to one of these colleges, they are where my mom and dad went, and I want to know what kind of a chance i will have. Thanks everyone.
No one can tell you your chances of acceptance without a GPA and SAT/ACT scores. Rank largely won’t matter because you aren’t a Texas resident, but your GPA certainly will. The top 7% in Texas high schools get automatic admission to UT but this doesn’t apply to Out of State applicants like yourself. Just keep your grades up and study hard for the SAT/ACT, if you do extremely well on your standardized tests you could very well get an OOS acceptance to one of these schools for engineering, just know UT will likely be a reach OOS.