<p>I'm Asian-Indian, Male, senior in high school.</p>
<p>ACT: 34
SAT: 2280
SAT Math 2: 800
sat chemistry: 800
AP tests:
calc 5
english 4
chem 4
US 4
euro 4</p>
<p>National merit Finalist.</p>
<p>My gpa is a 3.1, 3.6 weighted. I got all B's and a C last semester. As I posted in a previous thread, I used to not do that much work, but I'm really hard working...</p>
<p>I applied to</p>
<p>MIT (rejected)
Caltech (rejected)
northwestern
urbana-champaign (i got rejected here for bioengineering. This has me scared...)
Carnegie Mellon (not a chance)
Stanford (not a chance)
Cornell (not a chance)
WUSTL
Vanderbilt
Texas A&M
Michigan
Georgia Tech</p>
<p>It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I used to be the average socially inept Indian kid, and then during high school I would come home and try to read articles on the internet to learn how to hold conversations instead of doing my homework.</p>
<p>Yeah. Should I call my colleges and talk to someone in admissions, or what? I kind of want to, but it seems that a lot of people here think that trying to explain away bad grades and stuff is just making excuses, and that it's looked down upon by admissions staff.</p>
<p>What would you be telling them, exactly? That you didn’t do your work because you were surfing the Net? That you’re hardworking, except that you don’t actually work that hard?</p>
<p>Is that the whole list of schools to which you’ve applied?</p>
<p>It is a long shot for every school you applied too, you should have applied to other schools or for UIUC applied undecided and switched into engineering the next year.</p>
<p>I understand what you mean, people on here can tend to say oh, you don’t have a 4.0, you’re done for. That’s not the case though. If you show a good upward trend and that you are working now it will count for a lot. Should you say you got poor grades because you were anti-social, probably not. But you could say you got poor grades because you had a tough time adjusting to high school which it seems like you might have. Your testing scores are incredible, as well as your AP’s. Having high AP scores shows that you worked hard all year or you would not have known enough of the material. Colleges consider that. It would be good if you had applied to some safety schools but that’s not really the issue here. If you want to send a letter emphasizing how you have transformed and grown up through high school that could help, otherwise just seeing the improvements on your transcript will be good.</p>
<p>I think it was kind of stupid of you to apply to those top schools such as Caltech and Stanford, but I would’ve thought you would’ve gotten into UIUC with your test scores and upward trend in grades. If you wanted to explain your low GPA, shouldn’t you have consulted with your counselor first? And he or she will have included that part into their recommendation.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that it does no good to explain weak grades unless there is some serious factor that caused the problem, like illness, a death in the family, your house burning down, etc.</p>