So I’m a junior right now and I’m going to start applying to colleges next fall, and I was wondering what my current chances are for HYPSM type schools. I’m not necessarily dead set on one of these schools, just curious.
As of now, these are my stats and EC (and projected for the future)
GPA UW: 3.83
GPA W: 4.06
ACT: 33
SAT: 2220
AP classes: Physics, English IV, U.S. History, Government, Chemistry
Baseball (2 years, forced to quit due to injury)
Choir (1 year)
Debate (1 year)
Marketing internship at Plexuss (2 years, lead marketing campaign to students in my school)
86 volunteer hours (planning to push that above 100 over the summer)
Over the summer I’m planning on doing ECampus courses from Oregon State to get as much college credit as I can before starting college.
So what can I improve or add to my resume to increase my chances at these types of schools? The company I intern for, Plexuss, deals in college recruiting so I’m relatively knowledgable in this space, but I’d like for other people to be brutally honest about it.
A little light on both GPA and test scores. Further, for these schools, your EC is also a tad light. Think, 3.9+ unweighted, and 34+ ACT, or 2300 SAT. Are you in Oregon, city, suburbs, rural…? Any other potential hooks?
In Fort Worth, Texas at a private school, Oregon State just offers the online courses that work best for me. If it matters, the suburb I live in is one of the richest in the country. I put the 3.83 because my school has a program that allows me to retake 1 class my senior year if my schedule is light enough, which mine will be. Basically, I’m going to be able to get rid of the only 2 C’s on my transcript and bump my unweighted up near the 4.0 mark (I don’t know exactly what it will be). I’m also going to graduate with valedictorian honors, which is just my schools version of a valedictorian. I’m in ACT/SAT tutoring, so I have the potential to get my scores up in that range, I’ve only taken the ACT twice and the SAT once. The only reason I’m asking this is because the schools I really wanna go to, the US service academies, are just as hard to get into and USAFA liaison officer recommended at least checking these schools out because I have the potential to get my resume to that level. I don’t know how obscure I would need to get as far as EC’s go, I participate in competitive skeet shooting, I have a second internship which is in the same space as the one I listed above for a company called AdmitSee, the only club I’m involved in at my school is our “chapter” of SustainUS, which is basically a group of kids meeting unofficially to talk about world issues and things of that nature. I’ll have the opportunity to add more club related things and volunteer hours if that would help though.
okay as you wanted brutal honesty: the GPA is far too low, especially the weighted. You need at least five to seven more AP Courses and 5s on each exam. When you say AP physics do you mean AP Physics 1 or 2 or B or C and if C then which one? Also is “English IV” AP Language or Literature? Test scores are too low, nothing exceptional about the ECs especially for 4 years of high school (I am assuming when you say projected that means this is all you plan to do). The internship is interesting please expand on that. Also all these colleges have difficult curriculums. Once you get college credit to move up to harder classes it may be difficult to learn all the material.
Does your pvt school usually send a lot of kids to HYPSM? Just from stats and ECs alone, chances don’t look good at all- these schools don’t typically accept the kind of students who got Cs during their high school career. Areas to improve on w/ ECs are things like leadership.
Typically we send 2 or 3 a year to HYPSM schools. Personally, these schools aren’t my first choice but I wanted to gauge where I was at. The two Cs were at the school I went to my freshman year in Pre AP Biology, long story short the highest semester grade in her class was a B and she was let go the next year, and that’s the only reason I’m going to be allowed to drop it off my transcript and retake the class entirely.