College of Charleston and UGA definitely sound interesting – do you know if UGA has merit aid for OOS students? I know they have good in-state tuition through scholarships for students with a certain GPA, but I don’t know what their aid packages might look like for OOS.
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UGA often offers a 1/2 OOS deduction and sometimes a full OOS deduction to in-state rates.
C of C only works because you’d be a superstar there. My daughter’s scholarship is $40K vs. about $35K for tuition. She’s a Fellow, International Scholar, and Ketner Emerging Scholar - which is a service project and she used to start the refugee support club. She likely wouldn’t have had these opportunities had she chosen a more prestigious school - which she did get into since C of C was 16th of 17th by ranking - but she chose it for her.
I think when you are looking at “high” - that’s great for magazines but not necessarily impacting the real world for most kids. Just my opinion.
Find the place you’d like to be. Your list is full of different shapes and sizes.
The person best in a position to counsel you is your school counselor. Have they had other kids admitted to HYPSM and if so, what were their profiles? What will the school say about your ECs? Your academics seem adequate, but it is hard to judge the context or quality of your ECs. As you know, most legacy applicants are not admitted so while you have a chance, you should recognize the odds. You are also from an area that has some truly exceptional applicants, both legacy and non-legacy, against whom you will be competing.
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I really do think you are over analyzing to this extent. Have your reaches and you know what those are - Princeton and Williams to name two. Have your targets and a safety or two - and you’ll be fine.
As long as you do that and you can apply to as many as you want but make sure you have two 100% likely safeties, 2-3 targets and then the rest can be your Tufts, Hamilton, and other reaches etc.
You’ve done an awesome job and I’m sure you are ready. But you want to focus on school and being a kid and not fretting about this the next 6 months. Your set up is great and you’ll end up in the right place I’m quite confident - whether it’s Princeton or Connecticut College or UCSB.
Nothing will change from you being on here except you’ll be taking away from other more important parts of your life. Study the UGA (target), C of C (safety) and find a few others in the category (like IU - safety but a heck of a program). It doesn’t have to be these schools but schools with this likelihood of acceptance and affordability that you see something that would allow you to excel.
Have a couple each of those and then the rest can be over the top reaches.
But I’d say for now, be a kid. Do well in school. Partake outside. Enjoy your friends.
You will make your success. The world is mostly made up of non top school students. And you will be successful wherever you are.
But that’s for later. Time to be a teenager.
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Hmm, hard to say about this. My counselor has said she doesn’t have a lot of students applying to Princeton and only one applied to Williams (he did get in but it was 8 years ago and she just remembers he was “community-minded”) but she did say that the student who got into Princeton took a lot of initiative and she thought he could be a Senator or something one day, and then said he and I were super similar. No idea what she meant by this (personality? ECs? academics?) but I do know the profiles of some of the most recent students to get into top East Coast schools:
Class of 21, apparently it was the most competitive year ever for our school:
1 Princeton (was another counselor’s student): Didn’t know her but one of my friends did and all they know is that she head of a food bank’s teen volunteers, chem lab assistant, chemistry club president
1 Columbia: research with the Clean Air Club on our school’s air filters and spoke about it at a forum at Davis, was a NASA teen volunteer online during her junior year summer, president of science olympiad when they qualified for states, and led a fundraiser at a local food bank which raised $10,000 over two years
1 Brown: URM, part of a nearby prestigious choir school where he went in middle school and did international tours with them as a kid and then was a teen coach, also in the state choir, and served as a school board member, plus did work with GenUp and the CA Student Board Members Association, with leadership roles in both
Class of 22, this is where things were more “normal” in terms of admissions according to my counselor:
1 Stanford: Jazz musician, played in the school band (one of the best in the state though), learned like 5 instruments for fun, did half-marathons in SF with his dad, and received an honorable mention in an international songwriting contest for a piece he composed
1 MIT: founded a local nonprofit for free tutoring, ran the Science Olympiad club when the again got to states, and did three research internships at Cal, SFSU, and a private research company studying viruses and then Covid-19
1 Cornell + Dartmouth (went to UC Berkeley in the end though): Class president, varsity soccer, research summer program at UCSF, piano (may have done ABRSM but he didn’t tell me), co-president of MUN
Feels like I’m somewhat in between the Class of 21 and Class of 22 students. Most kids apply in-state mainly because of UC Berkeley and UCLA with lower tuitions – looking at Naviance, we never have more than 12 people apply to MIT or more than 17 to Yale in a class of 250. Still a lot, but something like 125+ kids apply to UCLA and 75+ apply to Stanford. Probably the most common OOS school for applications is Harvard but my counselor says nearly all the kids just “shoot their shot” and expect to not get in.
It looks to me like a good list. You have excellent grades and scores, so you should get a good stack of acceptances just in case the reach schools turn down your application. Good luck!
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Regarding your topic here on CC in general, I believe it went in the right direction. January is too early to form a fully established college list. Any refinements you have made or considered may improve the desirability of your final choices. Nonetheless, I don’t believe you need to search too widely at this time for especially likely admission prospects. Your considerable achievements seem sufficient for you to see several acceptances at even highly selective colleges.
Thanks so much!
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Hi all! If anyone still gets notifications or anything from this thread, I wanted to give a bit of an exciting update and also ask a question…
First of all, my debate partner and I won the JV round of a fairly small (40 pairs total) international invitational tournament a few weeks ago! Our school has no coach so we just don’t have the debate education to do varsity, which makes me feel really awkward as a junior (I had to tell the finals judges that I was the closest thing we had to a coach while the private school Canadians we were against had three coaches in the room) so I’m so happy that I was able to help us get our first tournament win in 6+ years!
I also was made captain of my two track events, triple and long jump, and got auto-varsity because we have a tiny team. I’m honestly pretty bad at track so I don’t know if I should include this on my application because it feels dishonest, since most captains and varsity athletes are actually good at what they do and I’m just good at teaching conditioning workouts and proper form…
Finally, my big question is: Would it be better to assist a professor at a CSU with her own research (which would get me credited on her paper) and also have her assist/guide my two research projects mentioned in my post, or just have a professor at Cal supervise me on the two projects as I initially said in the post?
I originally was recommended to the Cal prof by one of her colleagues who I babysat for, and we met over Zoom. She reviewed my project ideas and said she would definitely be willing to mentor me and supervise my research over Zoom, she also said that she could write me a LOR if I wanted. But then my Spanish teacher asked me if I would be interested in being a research assistant to a professor she knows at a CSU whose work focuses on rights for migrant workers. Among other things, I would be translating interview transcripts from Spanish to English, and would be listed on her paper when it was published. The CSU professor was also willing to supervise and help me with the two other research projects I wanted to do, and now I’m conflicted.
I really would like to do in-person research and have family near the CSU who I could stay with, getting on a paper is really appealing, and I would love to get to use my Spanish skills to help with important work. But I’m worried that a) Assisting with research on Spanish-speaking migrant workers’ living conditions and workers rights will just not tie in to the rest of my ECs and make me seem like a bad fit for a Middle Eastern Studies major, although I will be doing an asych Arabic class online the whole summer, and b) If the former concern is true, and I should leave my involvement in the workers’ rights research off my application, would I be better off pursuing the same research projects with a professor at Cal compared to a professor at a CSU?
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with CSUs but I’m worried AOs will prefer students who researched with “prestigious” professors at more widely-known institutions, and I’m scared that my activities already don’t have a super closely theme that ties them together.
Any help would be super appreciated!!!
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Honestly, it all sounds very good. Don’t worry that your using the foreign language that you’re already fluent in for research would detract from the fact that your intended field of study involves a different language. Schools understand that these skills are transferable.
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You’re in high school and are going to do research with a prof? Do what’s most convenient and impactful for you - I don’t think the affiliated college matters. Just my opinion.
You’re way ahead of the curve. You are again, overthinking.
But again, you will need targets and safeties too - which will still be great - but one only need to look at threads like UVA to know - these kids are still not getting in.
In other words, be the best you, and do things because you want to but not to get in.
Having a part time job at Panera may be just as good as research.
Don’t over think - and enjoy your year and in summer you can really start digging in.
You’re a hustler - you’re going to do great no matter what.
Best of luck.
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Keep in mind that none of us are admissions officers (or I think very, very few of us are), and that at best we’re just remarking on what we’ve seen on these boards and in our communities.
I’m going to remark on the bigger picture because your overall academic resume looks great. You’re maximizing your opportunities to the best of your ability and doing well. You are going to get accepted to some pretty fantastic schools. It would not be impossible to get into all of them. It also would not surprise me if you get rejected to a lot as well… but I do think it unlikely that you won’t get into a couple of very highly selective schools.
So, for your specific question on which one sounds better… I’d rather you ask yourself – which one you would rather do for yourself? Which one would get you excited to go do in the morning? To steal from Marie Kondo, which one sparks joy?
I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to try to treat each EC as a stepping stone to something else, but you really should be careful on what you are doing and why? I’ve known many of my friends to chase one shiny accolade after another and end up as a partner of a very presitigous law firm, and then realize they never did anything they actually wanted to do.
Just make sure you’re being intentional with your choices - do they make you happy and fulfilled? It doesn’t have to be an either/or choice – you can resume build while still doing meaningful activities.
For your choices, I don’t think it’s predictable which of your options will increase your chances to get into Yale at least from our seat here. I think they both enhance your resume, so I’d just focus on which one will make you the most excited. If you get rejected from say Yale, you’ll never know why (it probably won’t be because you chose the wrong EC here), so assuming that, would you regret not pursuing a particular EC? I mean if you choose X, get rejected from Yale, will you be sad you didn’t do Y because it would have made you happier even if didn’t get you into Yale?
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Congratulations on all your updates! I think the fact that you’re so a great teacher (to debate team members and to others on the track team) is awesome! I would see if one or both of your letters of recommendation can highlight that as well. It’s a really great way of showing how you contribute to your community (showing vs. telling).
With respect to Cal vs. Cal State, it probably doesn’t make a world of difference, but I would probably go with the Cal State option. Why? First off, you prefer in-person interactions. Secondly, you can learn (and universities know you are learning) about higher education research and how it is done. Additionally, the professor can indicate the real added-value of having you on the research team. This is important because there are students who post on these threads and talk about all their research with professors but it seems…dubious, particularly when other threads show websites where families pay a certain amount of money and their kid gets involved in research and named on a research paper. Not to say that none of it is legit…but this opportunity you’re talking about makes a lot of sense to me as an outsider. Thus, I suspect it will make a lot of sense and seem more legit for an admissions officer, too.
Be that as it may, I don’t think you’d go wrong with the UC professor. I am just putting in my two cents for Cal State. People in academia realize how challenging it is to get full-time positions at any college, regardless of its ranking on USNWR. I don’t think the university affiliation of the professor you’re being supervised by/doing research with will make much of an impact.
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Oh, I will also put another plug in for my alma mater Georgetown for you. I went to the School of Foreign Service, and focused most of my studies on the Middle East. Met my wife there, and she ended up in an NGO that ended up with us moving to Egypt for a while. They have a great middle eastern studies program, and it’s really hard to beat DC for opportunities to intern with NGO’s and think tanks. Based on what you’ve shared, I think you’d be a great fit.
I want to reiterate what @AustenNut said above in terms of comparing a CSU professor to a UC professor. It doesn’t matter that CSUs don’t have the national cachet that UCs do, because the quality of work you’d do with the CSU professor is going to be more enriching and eye-opening than the quality of work you’d do with the UC professor. The most important thing is that you’re working with a professor on original research and benefiting from mentorship – and potentially getting co-author credit on a resulting publication. I’m a professor at a regionally (not nationally) known university, and I can tell you that everyone in higher ed (including AOs) knows how the academic job market works – Ph.D.s are lucky to get tenure-track jobs at all, the specific jobs available in any given year are just a matter of random chance, and as a result, professors doing important work can be found in any institution. The fact is that CSUs are really good institutions, and the CSU professor is offering you an amazing opportunity. It sounds like you would get more out of it than you would out of a UC professor supervising your research (and I guarantee you, she wouldn’t have a whole lot of time to supervise you very closely, because you’d be a lower priority than her grad students and undergrads). So seize the opportunity, and take advantage of it. What a great experience for you.
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That’s not true. My DD was by far the slowest in her team which was neither small nor bad. She was voted by her teammates and was a great captain. This year the star athlete is captain, there is no sense of “team” and there are “the cool kids” and “the rest.”
My point is that athletic ability has nothing to do with leadership ability. It made for some great essays on the experience and how she viewed her role in the team.
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