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Could you guys tell me what my chances are for my RD schools too?
Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, UCs (B, LA, SD), NYU - Stern, Williams, UIUC, Harvey Mudd, Caltech
I’m always confused by continual bumps, or when people create multiple threads about basically the same thing.
Admission to all the top private schools is holistic, so any chance is just a guess. The adcom can do whatever they want. With that said, as previously discussed, you are a strong applicant. You don’t have any major flaws in terms of checking off the GPA/rank/test score/curricular rigor boxes. You are an international applicant, which hurts, but you don’t need financial aid, which helps a lot. You have some strong ECs, and a bunch of them seem to be cohesive in terms of falling under your math/CS interest (your math and CS research, RMO qualifier, national cyber olympiad, community service in CS education, your tech startup, and computer and math clubs), which is great for showing depth of interest and focus.
Overall, I think you are a competitive applicant to the top schools on your list. I don’t know enough about how the UCs work for international applicants to chance you there, but I would consider you to have a solid shot at all the other places listed. With that said, it’s a bit of a crapshoot. All things considered, I think the odds are you will get into somewhere quite good.
Disclaimer: I’m not a 100% verified source.
“International student” makes it super hard to get into these schools.
If you were a student in midwestern USA, you would get into Stanford easily! If you were in a more competitive state like California, you would probably get into most (maybe all) of the schools!
However, international students have it a lot harder.
UC Berkeley is known to have 14% of its class as international applicants, which is really nice. But that’s about as good as it can get for you.
SAT is fine, they don’t care too much about it from what I’ve heard. ACT 35 looks nicer than SAT 2200 though (even though its not actually much nicer XD)
In all cases, research is probably going to be your strongest point (I think?). AIME is effectively a requirement for math majors at top schools, so RMO isn’t too much of an outstanding point. Community service thing is also very nice, depends a bit on which school you are applying to.
Important point: Every school has very different admissions requirements. For example, MIT accepts over 70-90% of USAMO participants while Harvard accepts only about 30% [citation needed, got this from some guy on quora].