Italian student. Chances?

Chance Me / Match Me!
1

<p>Hey, I am an Italian student. I have just applied as an international freshman to a few colleges and I'd like to know what you think about my chances. I chose Physics as major.
I won't need financial aid.</p>

<p>Average grade in Italy: 7.8/10
I attend a liceo scientifico, which is kind of an AP high school with extra emphasis on math and sciences. Grading system is different, 5 is fail, average grade for a good student is 6/10. 8+/10 is equivalent to U.S.grade A+ (100). Same courses for all five years of high school: math, physics, science, Italian lit, English lit, Latin, philosophy, history, art history. School doesn't rank. </p>

<p>I spent my Junior year in Austin (TX) as an exchange student. I got straight As in every class. I took two honor classes: physics and precalc.
UW GPA during exchange year: 4.0</p>

<p>Sat I: 1840 (740 Math, 550 critical reading, 550 writing)
Very low, I know. The problem is that my English vocabulary is quite poor. English is not my first language ofc.</p>

<p>Sat II: 800 Math II, 770 Physics</p>

<p>TOEFL: 110/120</p>

<p>Educational prep. programs:
- Student exchange program: I lived for one year in Austin. I was host by a volunteer American family.
- Cultural exchange program: summer school of English in Dublin for two weeks x 2 years.</p>

<p>Volunteer and community service:
- Volunteered at a soup kitchen for homeless (60+ hours)
- Volunteered at an autism center ( 65+ hours)
- Refereed kids basketball games ( 30 hours)
- Volunteered for a Church's pumpkin patch (12 hours)</p>

<p>Extracurricular activities:
- Guitar courses and played in a metal band (9th, 10th, 11th, 12th)
- Swimming training sessions (9th, 10th, 12th)
- Played competitive basketball for my city's team (9th, 10th)
- Soccer team (11th)
- Chinese course (9th)</p>

<p>Awards and honors:
- NHS (only foreign student in my American high schools NHS chapter)
- Selected exchange student
- Scholarships awarded by 3M corporation
- Merit letters from my high school
- Municipal award for academic excellence</p>

<p>Additional skills and talents:
- Languages: Italian (first language), English (second language), French (studied for three years during middle school), Latin (studied for four years in high school), Chinese (just basics, I took a 1 year course for beginners).</p>

<p>Good essays (not outstanding I guess).
Good recommendations. (same as essays. One is written by my English teacher in Italy, one by my American host dad and one by the director of the most prestigious university in Milan, who knows me well)</p>

<p>The schools I am applying to are: CU Boulder, UCSB, UT Austin, UCLA, UCB, UChicago.</p>

<p>Thank you.</p>

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<p>Uchicago-high reach. While your GPA is near perfect(as you said 8+ is same as A+) your reading and writing score is way too low.
UC schools-reach due to low SAT.</p>

<p>OP, there are many many international students whose primary language is not English in the schools you mentioned, and if you think your English is “quite poor” as you said, I think you need to either reconsider studying in US schools, or study English intensively every second and improve it a lot(which is very unlikely). If you can’t fully understand the classes in colleges and get bad grades, what’s the point of going to US schools?</p>

<p>How do you define “quite poor”? is it like you can’t understand half of what native speakers say? Or do you read much slower than other people? Your writing seems fine. </p>

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<p>I can speak English very well, since I lived in the U.S. for one year and I’ve studied it for 10 years of my life, and I believe that my TOEFL score shows it. If I got a 4.0 GPA in America it’s because I could fully understand my classes, even better than most of my American classmates.</p>

<p>I didn’t mean to say that my English is poor, but just that my vocabulary is probably not as good as the one of an average Berkeley student for example, and this is why my SAT score is low. I am sure that it will not represent a problem for me at all and that it won’t hinder my capability to understand my Physics classes and to excel in it.
However, I am aware of the fact that it lowers my chances.</p>

<p>Do you think that Berkeley, UCLA Chicago are almost impossible for me? And what about Texas, UCSB and CU Boulder, are they reaches too?</p>

<p>Thanks :)</p>

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<p>Uchicago is just a reach for anyone, so it’s hard to predict whether you get in. Can you get in? Yes. Will you get in? No one can tell. Two people whom I knew were very qualified were waitlisted last year.(they went to WUSTL)
Yes your reading scores and writing scores are too low for the others, too.
If your concern is vocabulary, all you need to do is to read vocab books like WordSmart by the Princeton Review. It has lots of SAT vocabularies, and if you study a lot and do more practices, I’m very sure your score will get at least mid 600s, or even 700s. </p>

<p>There are lots of threads in CC that has good SAT guides. I think you need to read them first. </p>

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<p>Others?</p>