HS Junior's Chances

<p>Hey, as I'm ~halfway through my junior year, I'm wondering how my chances are stacking up for Cornell's ILR school.
My stats:
I'm not sure what my total GPA is, but so far: Freshman-3.8 IIRC, Sophomore-3.36, Junior-3.12 for first semester.
(All unweighted-considering my high count of honors/aps should be much better weighted)
215 on PSAT-taking SAT in march.
32 on PLAN-as I understand it, like the PSAT for the ACT, I don't plan to take the ACT if I do well enough on my SAT next month.
Extracurriculars
5 summers of JHU's CTY summer program.
Rowing-will have 5 seasons done by graduation, started spring of sophomore year-not good enough to really matter.
Swimming-started this year, just finished the season.
Free The Children-I've been active in this club since freshman year.
(Fingers Crossed) Cornell's summer college program this summer for a course taught by an ILR professor.</p>

<p>Other Props-I live in Ithaca and will graduate from IHS. Apparently this is a + in Cornell's eyes. On the other hand, the high admission stats from my high school are slanted because of the many students who are legacies/have parents working for cornell, while I have no connection.
As an aside on my grades, my GPA is essentially divided on a fault-line of humanities courses and math courses, with straight As/A-s in english and history classes and significantly worse grades in Math classes and AP chem.
I currently plan to apply Early decision to cornell's school of ILR next year, so any guesses on my odds?</p>

<p>i would recommend not worrying about the act and just focus on the sat. i got a 35 on my act and thought i was set. my interviewers told me to the take the sat, on which i didn’t score in quite that percentile, and pretty much every school i applied to only cared about the sat.</p>

<p>you need to work on your gpa. an ‘upward trend’ is highly desired. take a bunch of ap’s next year (or IB if your school offers)- having a few 5’s makes it look like you can handle college work well.</p>

<p>Judging from the GPA I would say it would be a reach but since you are from Ithaca not sure if this might change some things…but I agreed with blue, take aps next year to score well on the ap exams. Also, im not sure if the ACT thing is true, I thought colleges let you take either one. </p>

<p>Good luck!</p>

<p>I plan to not take the ACT, assuming that I score well enough (2100ish) on the SAT.
As far as taking APs, my tentative schedule for next year is:
AP Stats
AP Calc AB
AP Lang
AP Bio
Gov/Econ-AP not offered for these. I am currently enrolled in an online AP Macroecon class right now through JHU as a response to this. I currently have a 92%.
Medieval History/Foods that Shaped the world-Each one semester courses. These are taught by my sophomore history teacher, and I may hit her up for a rec after having had more classes with her than most teachers.
My GPA obviously is my achilles heel. I’ve been trying to pull up this year’s, and hopefully I’ll be able to pull a good one first quarter next year for my ED app.
One of my big prayers right now is the summer college at cornell that I have applied to. I believe that it will either confirm that it is the place for me, or tell me that I should find a new dream school</p>

<p>As an update, I got my transcript yesterday for the purpose of applying to a summer program at Penn, and my overall GPA is a 3.53. Will be better by the end of this year.</p>

<p>also, in terms of gpa, colleges care about the junior the most so try and step it up this year and then i would say you have a pretty solid chance</p>

<p>Haha the problem is my GPA is a steep downward slope. I’m doing what I can though, for sure. Thanks for the advice and thoughts.</p>

<p>^yea, that will be an issue. a drop from 3.8 to 3.12 raises a red flag, since junior year is the most important year. you still have some opportunities to compensate for this- really buckle down this second semester.</p>