My Schools. Feedback please?

<p>Hi, I would love to have some feedback on my list of colleges. RIght now I'm worrying because a lot of my schools are really hard to get in. </p>

<p>I have an unweighted 3.76 GPA (9-11), 3.97 weighted (9-11), 3.8 (10-11), and 4.12 weighted (10-11). My GPA's low since I got several B's freshmen year and we are not allowed to take AP's until Junior year. Sophomores we can take one (AP Music Theory), which I did. My senior schedule is: Marching Band, AP Gov, Honors Econ, Contemporary Literature, AP Stats, AP Chem, Basketball, Orchestra, Band, and Culinary Arts. I'm planning to add Jazz Band to that when it starts in November. </p>

<p>My ACT and SAT are both really bad but I'm planning to retake both of them in Sept. / Oct. I got a 29 on ACT w/ 9 on writing. 2110 on SAT. 800 SAT II Math Level 2, but 680 SAT II Physics. I don't think I'll have time to retake the Physics SAT II though. </p>

<p>I've taken 4 AP's; AP Physics (4), AP Calculus BC (5), AP Comp Sci (5), and AP Music Theory (5). I just received my AP Scholar with Honor award, but I don't think that will do any good.</p>

<p>My Extra Curriculars are pretty lame. I'm in the highest Orchestra at my school and we went on a concert tour last year to Seattle (got 1st on all 4 competitions); got onto the basketball team freshman year; did long jump for track freshman year; got into the High School All-State Honor Orchestra freshman year; Marching Band performed at the Rose Bowl a few years back; I take piano lessons (won about 10-15 competitions since 9th grade); take flute lessons but no competitions; volunteer at senior centers playing music for fun; and probably what I do most of the time is computer programming for fun. </p>

<p>Long story short, I build ROMs and Kernels for Android devices. Here's a quick explanation for those who don't know. Android is open source which means Google releases all the code to the public, so anyone with the knowledge can download it and tweak it to their desires. We can add our own features (by coding it into the framework), enhance speed, remove features we don't need, or just optimize it (speed / battery / performance) for your specific device. A ROM is basically the operating system of a phone. There are many communities who use the Android source and work together to build their own vision of what they want Android to be. Many of them add features not available in Android such as floating windows, which allows one to open an app "floating" on top of another app already running. Another popular one I like is the ability to see your notifications on the lock screen. Anyway, I am part of several teams such as the PAC Team, OmniROM, Vanir, Carbon, and AOSB. I started sophomore year when I got my first Android device, the Galaxy Note 8. Before I started working on the device, there was close to no open-community development for it. However, now I've influenced a lot of people to work on compiling ROMs for this tablet. So far, my various downloads easily add up to several thousand, the most being a build of Omni back in December with close to a thousand downloads.</p>

<p>Finally, here's my list of schools I'm applying to. It's a bit long so I want to maybe cut back and especially add more safety schools.</p>

<p>Stanford, Princeton, MIT, University of Chicago, Rice, Johns Hopkins (applying early), UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, UCLA, Harvey Mudd, CalPoly San Luis Obispo, Boston College, NYU (?? Should I take this out?), UCI, University of Washington</p>

<p>I'm only applying to Princeton because it's really pretty even though I have no chance of getting in. MIT because a family member went there. I'm also thinking about adding Tufts and Northeastern.</p>

<p>Sorry its a bit long and apologize for any typos. Thanks in advance!</p>

<p>EDIT: I’m also Vice President of a computer graphics / design club.</p>

<p>Your interests in Android is great (sounds like both fun and something which could make an impressive essay, perhaps one of the short essays, on the app) and presumably the Piano competitions will also help … but for the SAT score and grades they are low (25% or lower) for many you listed (e.g. Stanford, Princeton, MIT, Chicago, Rice). So clearly you need to add some matches and some safeties to your list (which is mostly reaches until your scores go up). For example you could look at the AITU list (<a href=“http://www.theaitu.org/”>http://www.theaitu.org/&lt;/a&gt;) and choose some slightly easier-to-get-in schools.</p>