Hi everyone,
This is my first CC post, I applied to ND regular decision awhile ago and I’d like some opinions on how likely it is that I’ll be accepted. I’d like to mention that I have a parent who attended ND for undergrad, mentioning this because I’ve heard that legacy presence is relatively significant at ND.
I’ll start with my academic stuff:
1450 sat, 780 reading and 670 math, did not take ACT, 3.89 GPA unweighted, my school doesn’t do weighted GPA. Class rank is just 40/650, however the only thing my school takes into account when calculating class rank is GPA on a 4.0 scale, disregarding course load. So there are 39ish other students at my school with a GPA higher than 3.89. By the time I finish up senior year I’ll have taken 8 AP classes, and four years of Spanish.
Senior year classes:
AP gov
AP English lit
AP stats
Pre-AP chemistry
Health (required to graduate)
Concert Orchestra
Extracurriculars:
Lettered in water polo three times and wrestling twice, was a captain and made the all-league team in water polo my senior year, won a few team awards and a few league awards.
I volunteer after school tutoring students whose first language is Spanish and are uncomfortable with English, pretty much all of the tutoring is done in Spanish obviously. I’m also an active member of my school’s Spanish club.
I’m also involved with my local Catholic church. I participate in its youth group, I’ve been an altar server (essentially a ceremonial priest’s assistant during Catholic Mass for those who aren’t Catholic) for about ten years now, and I volunteer as a counselor at the Vacation Bible School my church hosts every summer.
I’m about to become an eagle scout, I joined scouting very late compared to most and am just now finishing up my final project and paperwork for all that. I have been in lots of different leadership positions in my troop, most notably I was elected leader by my troop for a lengthy backpacking trip in New Mexico, so I was responsible for leading training hikes to prepare everyone for it and making all the decisions and ensuring nothing went wrong on the hike.
I’ve played the string bass for eight years, and have taken orchestra classes at school ever since starting the bass.
Recommendations:
Generally pretty solid I hope, I have the required one from a counselor, one from my past AP psychology teacher, and I believe an extra one from my water polo coach.
Essays:
I chose the “first impression” and “take a risk” prompts for the supplement. Overall feeling quite confident about my essays. It’s important to note that it’s difficult to chance someone without seeing the essays because they’re so important, so just assume that my essays are solid all-around, but likely not the absolute finest essays the counselors have ever seen. Notre Dame is my absolute top choice and if accepted I will attend there, I believe I made that clear in my essays without sounding too generic or wasting too many words on something that many people talk about.
Any feedback is appreciated, feel free to ask me clarifying questions to give you a better picture of my applications or if I’ve accidentally left something out. And if you don’t believe my chances are good, please refrain from informing me of the importance of safety schools as a way of saying my chances are low, I have safety schools covered.
I apologize if I’ve grossly violated any unwritten rules/breached etiquette of this site, as I’m new here. If anything of the sort has happened, you’re welcome to inform me.
Thank you!!