<p>I'm on my gap year right now, wanted some time to get experienced in life/business</p>
<p>Sidenote: I am from Turkey, and we have LITERALLY no EC activities here. All you need to go to the best college in the country is to get a good score from an SAT-like exam. Your GPA, ECs, grades, transcripts don't even matter. All the ECs I'm going to list are totally my own work, with no help whatsoever from my school.</p>
<p>Ethnicity - Half Turkish/Persian, grew up in Turkey(16 years spent there), Caucasian White</p>
<p>Age - 17 in June '13</p>
<p>SAT - 2350 (750 CR, 800 M, 800W(11E))</p>
<p>SAT II - (Math I - 780, World History 790, Bio 760 - PROJECTED)
Class rank - Not ranked in any school in my country</p>
<p>GPA - Not calculated, but senior year grades are simply amazing, all of my grades are 95+/100</p>
<p>Course load - Can't choose your classes, but really heavy</p>
<p>School - Elite private school that sends a reasonable amount of students to top universities in Turkey annually, probably not known internationally, but has ties with the NYU (I don't really know what kind of connection my school has with NYU, but we would see NYU representatives every month at a school-wide conference)</p>
<p>Teacher Recs:
1st teacher : above-average, 7/10, Turkish, translated by English teacher
2nd teacher: really good, 9/10, American who was a teacher at my college with a Ph.D on Education from University of Florida
counselor: really good. 8/10 Turkish, translated by English teacher</p>
<p>Extracurriculars - Member of school basketball club, president of "nature and recycling club" (even though all we did was attend a class 1h weekly all year)</p>
<p>Now my real accomplishments start ;</p>
<p>During my gap year I went to Iran, a country which is struggling both economically and politically. My father and my mother are separated, and since my father is Persian he lives there. I wanted to learn about my other nationality and decided to go there for 11 months, where I studied for the SAT and tried to create a business myself. Keep in mind that I knew an adequate level of Persian beforehand.</p>
<p>My father had a 70 something apartments/flats/houses all through Tehran, 23 of which were registered to my name.</p>
<p>After 3 months I spent in Iran and got a basic grasp of the economy, I asked my father for permission to try the property business myself with 10 of the houses registered to my name, with no help from other people but of course under the supervision of my father. Basically, my plan was to sell 2 of my houses to generate capital, buy newly constructed apartments with basically empty internals, make that apartment's internals better by spending some money, and sell the house for more than the house's original value+decorations. In 4 months I made around 100k$ profit completely on my own, which is roughly 1 apartment in Tehran right now.</p>
<p>After financial crisis struck Iran (Dec '12) USD's value basically doubled. I wanted to try the dollar exchange business and possibly exploit the crisis to earn money (buying-selling dollars for profit.) I have a close friend who is in this biz and after he taught me the job, thanks to the rising $ prices as well, I made around 9K$ in roughly a week. After a while the dollar stabilized, making the work less risky but also less profitable.</p>
<p>My usual investment was 30k$ daily (unless weird stuff was happening to the economy again, we had sudden drops and sudden rises that sometimes caused loss or sometimes epic profit), and 80% of the time I would make at least 600$ daily.</p>
<p>During this time I also studied for the SAT, I was a natural on the Writing and Math sections; writing being my own grammatical skills and math, well, thanks to the ultra-hard math courses in Turkey.</p>
<p>My biggest problem was the CR section, but I managed to crack it thanks to CC and of course working hard(by spending a couple of hours reading NYTimes/WSJ/Wikipedia/scientific articles and solving CR tests daily.)</p>
<p>I took SAT I in Turkey on Jan 26, and got a 2350.</p>
<p>I'm taking the SAT II on June, and the scores above are practice test scores that I get consistently, so unless something devastating happens those scores should be official in a few months. :)</p>
<p>I have lots of documents to prove that every single thing I have claimed above is real, from property deeds to bank accounts.</p>
<p>Other accomplishments: Learned English completely on my own in Turkey, a country which severely struggles with its English speakers. No classes whatsoever, learned it all myself through the internet (I'm online since I was 9 i guess)</p>
<p>Attended some business seminars in Istanbul, Turkey</p>
<p>Family Income: 1.5M$+/year, depends on the economy but should be at least 1.5M</p>
<p>Intended major: International finances or economics to law school</p>
<p>Schools I want to apply to:</p>
<p>Desired:</p>
<p>Harvard
Yale
Stanford
Princeton</p>
<p>Will go if not accepted to above:</p>
<p>UPenn
UChicago
Brown
Dartmouth
Williams</p>
<p>Safety:</p>
<p>NYU
Swarthmore
Johns Hopkins
Possibly more</p>
<p>Thanks for reading!</p>
<p>P.S.: I'm sure some people will be hesitant to believe what I have asserted, you don't need to believe it, PLEASE just chance me without any of these hesitations. The admission committee will have proof of everything claimed above.</p>
) and judging from the admission rates of the alumni of my school, I’d have to agree with the above - none of your schools could be considered safeties, even with excellent academics. The Ivies are always a crap shot, there are a lot of people at my school who still get rejected even with excellent scores and GPA + a bunch of EC activites. (though it’s also worth noting that many of them need financial aid, which is not a problem for you, but I still wouldn’t count on this)</p>