Hello.
I’m currently a 9th grader, and it is a bit early to be worrying about college, but I want to go to Harvard or Yale really bad because my eldest sister went.
Except, I’m not as smart.
So I was wondering how bad do a couple B’s affect your chances to Harvard or Yale?
It’s just I already have a B in geometry and I figured, I’m probably gonna get a few B’s during high school because I’m terrible at physics and i hear calculus is very hard and everything. Pretty much anything math related that’s not algebra too.
Also, how much does Yale and Harvard take into account your class rank? I feel like I’m slipping and many people, I feel, have a higher rank than me with all their grades combined.
My grades (currently)-
Geometry: 86
AP Human Geography: 98
French: 96 (perhaps a 95 tomorrow because I got an 80 on a quiz today)
Spanish: 95
LA: 91
Chemistry: 94
Since you’re still very young, here’s my advice for you. Don’t go to a college because your sibling went to it: pick one that you love the atmosphere off and one that is great for your potential major.
@cat105, the good news is:
9th grade grades don’t matter much
Some kids really mature and bloom somewhere around sophomore year.
@Oceaman’s post is spot on; find your college, when the time comes. My Yale kid would have been a bad fit at Skidmore; my Skidmore kid would have been a bad fit at Yale.
In any case, you have time. Work hard. Be nice. Be interested.
thanks guys. As much as I really wanna go, I have doubts about it but my well, er, my desire to go is really really big and so now I’m trying to sorta wean off the entire line of “brand name colleges are the best” etc.
When considering colleges (especially Yale and peers), it might be worth asking yourself how happy you’d be academically, as academics will take a large chunk of your time.
Yale requires students to take classes across a range of departments (including science, quantitative reasoning and social sciences). If you find that you struggle in a few of these areas throughout high school, I would recommend thinking about how these stressors would weigh on an undergraduate experience at Yale.
I did reasonably well at Yale (graduated with honors), however, I definitely found some classes extremely stressful, especially when I miscalculated the expectations in subjects outside my major. If I ever have kids, and they might find the academic requirements at Yale unduly stressful, I would not suggest they apply. Aside from the stress during the degree, low GPAs can make it difficult to get into some graduate programs and jobs.
There’s also a lot to be said about taking a different path to your siblings and how that affords an opportunity to carve out an identity for yourself. I’m one of three siblings and we’re all quite close in age - our parents made sure we went to different high schools. My siblings ended up at the same college, but it was a huge state school and they only ran into each other once or twice. We’ve all taken different journeys and we’re happy - one sibling is a lawyer, I work in finance but am considering PhD study in the field, and the other sibling is still studying, but competing in state and national competitions across two separate sports. If we had been in the same high school or same degree program, we wouldn’t be fulfilled like we are now.