Major College Admission Problem

Applying to College
1

<p>Here are my academic stats:</p>

<p>2.97 GPA (unweighted)
1960 SAT (2000 if combined)
30 ACT
Teacher Recs from AP US teacher and AP Calc teacher.
I have taken 9 AP classes and all honors except English my entire high school career.</p>

<p>Here are some extracurriculur stuff:</p>

<p>I have been a tutor at my local library for 3 years now.</p>

<p>I work for my school's Work Intern Program, which allows me to save money off tuition (3 days a week from 3pm to 5pm)</p>

<p>I was a member of the Key Club for 3 years. I quit this year to focus on WIP.</p>

<p>I was a member of NHS for 2 years (sophomore, junior)</p>

<p>My SAT and ACT are not bad, and I retook the SAT and I'm waiting for my scores to come back. But my GPA obviously sucks. Now, weighted it is 3.57 out of 5, but I know most colleges don't look at weighted as much as they look at curriculum + unweighted GPA. The colleges I'm applying to are:</p>

<ol>
<li>Lehigh (my reach school)</li>
<li>BYU</li>
<li>Arkansas</li>
<li>Montana State</li>
<li>UC-Riverside</li>
<li>Northeastern</li>
<li>Miami</li>
<li>Arizona</li>
</ol>

<p>In no particular order. I know most colleges want AT LEAST a 3.0 GPA, but I struggld my sophomore year big time (3 C's, 1 D). My other years were much better. Do you think I have a chance at any of these colleges?</p>

2

<p>Any extenuating circumstances you can talk about re your second year? You might want a letter from your guidance counselor to explain why that year is so anomalous. </p>

<p>Check the Common Data Set, section C, to see how you compare to admitted students for each of these schools. Example: <a href=“http://www.lehigh.edu/~oir/cds/lucds2011.htm[/url]”>http://www.lehigh.edu/~oir/cds/lucds2011.htm&lt;/a&gt; Note that 99% of the kids admitted where in the top 25% of their class and 95% were in the top 10%. I’m sure the 4% difference was probably for kids with hooks of various sorts. If you are not in at least the top 10% of your class (which seems unlikely), it’s probably not worth applying, even if your test scores are great.</p>

3

<p>I think you will be fine at most of your schools, and having some reaches is good. Leaves a bit of serendipity. My kids all tended to have 3.0s unewighted, and it seemed to be fine most of the time.</p>

<p>Just make sure that at least one of your schools is a sure thing for you and that your family can afford it. With that in place, you are good.</p>