Hi guys, I am not an American and I still have two years before get into college.
Unfortunately, I transferred into American school only one year before. Obviously, I was taking basic courses when I am in 10 grade which actually I am very behind than those normal students I think.
I really want to get into Yale. However, I just saw a video on youtube which it’s talking abt “how did Yale students get into Yale”. They all took more than 8 AP courses during high school, the lowest grade they got was B, and the average of their GPA was above 4.8. I am just wondering is it such an impossible thing for me to set Yale as my goal???
I am going to take my first two AP courses in grade 11. My GPA from grade 10 was 3.43 (cuz I was suffering adapting the environment at the beginning). Although our teachers told us that colleges will still look at your progress between grades, I do not think that it will really work on me by having a late starting line.
I am so nervous right now. Are there any suggestion or comment? Please, anything will be okay. Thank you all.
Just do the numbers. Yale received 47,000 applications this year and accepted 2169 new students. Then consider that very few of those who apply to Yale aren’t top students already. Then consider that some of those who ere accepted had special considerations - athletics, other special talents, legacies, underrepresented minorities - thereby making even fewer spots available to the general pool of applicants. Mathematically the odds are astronomically against you even if you are a top student.
Here are some alternatives to Yale which offer some of the qualities which Yale offers:
Wesleyan
Washington U/St. Louis
Carnegie-Mellon
Wake Forest
Harvey Mudd
Williams
Wheaton (MA)
Northwestern
Vassar
There are a lot of very good universities in the US, and a lot of very good universities outside of the US. Why does Yale particularly appeal to you?
Top universities such as Yale are academically very demanding. Students who never got a B in their life show up at Yale and discover that they are suddenly average and classes are going faster than they have ever seen before. Tests and exams are tough.
If you were the #1 top student in your high school, and if you attend Yale, you are likely to be average. The same thing would be true of Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, and a few other top schools.
What do you want to study in university? What country are you from?
Maybe on the videos you saw but definitely not all Yale students have taken that many APs! Almost none of the recent Yale students that I know have had that many APs (b/c they went to schools that didn’t offer or limited the # of APs a student can take).and I don’t think that any had a GPA as high as 4.8 (which is a weighted GPA)- lots had UW GPAs of 3.8-4.0 though.
What you do see is students that ‘stand out’: students who are exceptional in their cohort, both academically and in some other way(s). Like the others, I think that
you are extremely unlikely to end up at Yale: only 5% of applicants do end up there, and only 10% of that 5% are international students. So, being ‘nervous’ is a waste of energy. Put that energy into your studies and into your actual interests.
your other thread asks about the env sci / env degrees. It is unusual for those to be “direct admit” subjects, which means that you don’t have to pick which one until after you have started at university (usually in year 2). BUT you asked if you had to take chem/bio/physics in HS to do those courses: if you are applying to ‘selective’ colleges they all typically like you to take one of each of those in HS, no matter what you plan to study, and take a 2nd year of one of them at a higher level (such as honors or AP) if offered.
If your interest is environmental, put your time into finding good colleges & universities for that subject. For example, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities is as highly ranked for environ as Yale- but a whole lot more likely to admit you. It’s easy to find famous things to fall in love with, but you have to be realistic: lots of people who “want” Lamborghini’s drive Toyotas!
Northwestern students have a sense of pride about their school. Like Yale, the student culture on campus is competitive due to its rigorous nature, but the school emphasizes creativity and collaboration in such a way that its not cutthroat or aggressive. A number of Northwestern students go into creative or artistic fields, which Yale students often do as well.
Many people want to be Yale students. They are not going to be. Many kids who get inot Yale have gone through all kinds of difficult circumstances and still had very high GPAs. Those are the kids you would be competing against.
Find other schools to love where your odds of getting in are much better. It is critical to make a balanced list of schools with safety and match schools being most important. Apply to a few reaches if you like, but understand that if you get in, it’s a bonus. It is not easy to get into reaches and that’s why they are called reaches. You need schools where your overall GPA is in line with the majority of admitted students. You can get this information by looking at a college’s Common Data Set.
I suggest you let go of Yale. It is extremely unlikely you will get in and spending two years being nervous about something you have no control over is the definition of wasted time. There are thousands of colleges. Find others to get excited about.
Just a disclaimer here, I’m not even a high school student yet, so please take my words with a grain of salt.
First off, it sounds like you’re really desperate to get into Yale. Like Bill_Marsh said, there are many other alternatives which offer some of the qualities which Yale has.
Second off, who told you that every single Yale student on Youtube took more than 8 AP courses…? That’s really not even a realistic expectation, and if you have 4 APs, you’ll most likely be pretty fine.
And as a reply to your comment about ‘progress between grades’, I can confirm that colleges really do look at it. In fact, I’d say it’s better if you have a 3.5 in 10th grade and suddenly jump to a 4 in 11th grade and keep that up for the rest of your high school years.
I don’t think that a 3.5 one year and 4.0 the next two years is better than 4.0 all years, and colleges like to see rigor. I do think that all AP classes aren’t the same, AP physics and calculus beat AP environmental and AP statistics.
My kids HS had a solid track record sending kids to Yale. Most had 4 AP’s (in total) since you needed approval from the administration to take more than 4. The year one of my kids graduated a very talented young woman took 5 AP’s and was admitted to Yale- but went to Harvard.
14-15 AP’s? Not possible at my kids HS. AP’s are only for seniors, which means you choose the subjects carefully. And the school does not offer the “AP Lites” anyway- Psych, etc. AP’s are in the core subjects- bio, physics, chem, Calc BC, Euro and American history, etc.
When the time comes for you to apply to colleges, see if your transcript and standardized test scores would qualify you for admission to, say, Trinity. If Trinity seems like a likely admission for you, then Yale might be within reach. However, if, by objective criteria, Trinity appears like it imight represent a reach, then Yale would be out-of-reach, and I wouldn’t recommend that you apply.