Hello everyone, I am a senior high school student from Argentina wanting to get admitted into an american university to study aerospace engineering. I plan on applying to the ivy leagues, mainly due to the fact that I would need financial aid to pay for my studies; the universities I am applying to are MIT, Standford, and Yale. I may or may not apply some others but I have no idea what chances of getting admitted are. I dont know if these universities will care about the experience i havewhich have been mostly out of school and with things i have done on my own with little to no help. I will tell you everything about
-My school is one of the toughest in the country, the highest average grades in my school are of around 8.6/10, and I dont really understand how colleges handle translating those grades into GPA. My average is 8/10, but if we were to look only at my math, chemistry and physics grades, you would see an average of around 9/10, which is easily amongst the top 10% of my class. I got a 2000 on the old SAT, and will be taking the new test in november to improve on the score. Next week im sitting for the math II subject test, so wish me luck 
-There are no clubs in my school, so the EC I have taken have been on my own, and have been very much limited by having to pay them. 3 years ago I took up German, initially just because i was interested in the language and wanted a challenge. I have a level equivalent to B2, which is fairly good, and am hoping to sit for the Goethe B2 exam next year, i will take my time to do well. It has been relatively useful, as it has helped me read material on rocketry that I otherwise wouldnt have been able to understand, such as papers on old german technology (the OTRAG series of rockets mainly). I also speak french, a language I have been learning since primary school, and spanish of course. I play the piano, and will be sending a music supplement of me playing a couple of bach’s preludes and fugues from the well tempered clavier.
-The main thing that sets me apart, i think, is my passion for space and rocketry. The potential that space, and the time to do things in the industry seems to be now. The interest I had for rocketry led me to start working on my own experimental rocket motors, as high power ones are hard to come by here in argentina. I wanted to test whether my interest in the field was real enough that I would be willing to take on a hard challenge. So, when I was 15 I built my first motor with potassium nitrate and sugar as a fuel, and PVC tubes for the combustion chamber. I had to learn a lot of math, I had to teach myself a lot of calculus to understand the mechanics and dynamics of a rocket, as well as some thermodynamics and chemistry. I designed, built, and tested engines going up to 1000 n.s of impulse, completly on my own and with a fair share of failures on the way.
I then met a person at an entrepreneurship’s course who was building a nano satellite manufacturing company, we had a good chat about where the industry was heading and where the possibilities for the future were. He told me that once i was done with high school i could do an internship there no problem.
After that I started designing a rocket for hail supression, and in my efforts to make the project more customer driven i contacted the people in charge of the anti hail campaign in my country. They were extremly interested in what i was doing but explained to me some of the reasons why they thought it couldnt work, luckily though they contacted me with some other people in the industry, engineers and scientist from the Air force, a couple of people from our national space agency, and also some scientists who had managed to sneak NASA. This year I visited a local university where they are building an orbital launch vehicle (they are contractors for CONAE), they were impressed with the things i had been doing and helped me with some of the problems i was having with the flight simulation program i was working on. I went there several times after that, and got to meet the dean, who was please to have me there and told me he could guarantee me a spot the following year to start working on the rocket there, in light of how passionate he thought i was about the project and my ability to learn pretty fast.
-This year i was invited to the biannual space technology congress; there i got to see some pretty cool stuff, and discuss my research with other people who were doing similar things. I also took part in the first space generation workshop in south america, I was involved in the group that analyzed the possibility of creating a south american space agency, its great because the recommendations we wrote are going to be read on the next meeting of the united nation’s comitee for the peaceful uses of outer space.
I also started building a two stage rocket with some students from the university of Tijuana who contacted me after seeing what i was doing. I optimized the rocket using the simulation program i had written and some very simple rocket design laws to estimate the weight of the rocket and characteristics of the engines. I performed a static test of a miniaturized engine which went just fine, and then tried to launch the second stage but had a failure and lost the vehicle. Back in tijuana they managed a sponsor to get us 1000 bucks, with which we will using to build our first rocket. That same sponsor also put us in touch with the president of the baja california aerospace cluster who is interested in the project, told us that he would be willing to give us up to 20k when we had a couple of launches and had developed the necessary technologies.
More recently I went back to the anti hail rocket drawing board, and joined a team who had done some experiences in the field. We just built 3 rockets to test the various components that we need, and will be lauching them later in october. I already started contacting the people i know in the anti hail campaign, to go visit them and see their operations, trying to get some better numbers on their current operation costs.
So, having said all that, do you think I have any chance whatsoever of getting into any of the universities i listed? It is my dream to go to the US, where all the great geniuses of rocketry have worked some time or another; mainly because it is a lot easier to get funding and to find the right people needed to start up a company in the space business (though its still hard…). Thanks a lot for reading so far! Please tell me what you think, I dont want waste time and money applying to the us if my chances are slim and i will only get frustrated.