I have really strong ECs (Published research, patent, sole founder of a community project that raised over 20k dollars) and good stats (perfect GPA, 1540 sat). So I am covered on that end. I am also a bay area asian male applying for environmental studies + cog sci. I expect my essays to be great since my consultant is a very prolific A2C user that has a 60% T10 admit rate (not scholargrade). I am planning to shotgun all the T20s.
However I do have some social anxiety in class to the point where I don’t stand out among the rest of my classmates. My eyes are glued to my computer to avert discussion at the start of class. Sure, I participate a whole lot, but I cannot make a personal connection to my teacher. In fact my own teacher shows preferable behavior to other more social students over me. She refrains from eye contact, and is more interested in other kids who participate less.
She knows of everything i am doing, but whenever I try and talk to her personally it seems like she shies away from conversation (last semester this happened a lot with me particularly, any other kid she is comfortable with). She is my only possible humanities/AP rec. If I don’t have her in the bag, I might be done for.
Of course, I might have some toxic traits that she sees in me. I hope she doesn’t say anything negative, but if she drops things that might give a slight indication to my lack of extroversion/intense social awkwardness, how screwed am I? Is it common for teacher to mention lack of peer to peer interaction. And if that happens, am I done for (in terms of T10s?)
I am worried since my friend (published research in Springer, made nationals in linguistics olympiad, national quizbowl competetor, eagle scout) got rejected from caltech and MIT. He probably will gets rejected from the other 4 ivies he applied to. His essays were pretty good and his stats were perfect. However, like me, he is extremely antisocial and disconnected. I feel like recs play a HUGE MASSIVE role that I seemingly have no control over.
Edit: The good news is that my teacher is fine with giving me a recommendation. I asked her for one for a summer program. I am just worried she will drop stuff that will make me look weird and antisocial