ND, too big a reach? Chances?

<p>White Male:
-Junior in a top 100 in nation public school.
-3.55 (trending upward) unweighted GPA, 4.something weighted.
-Haven't taken SAT or ACT yet, unfortunately.
-Rigorous course schedule, however each year I have had a 2 nonweighted easy 100 classes. The rest are AP's or highest honors.
-Will be Eagle scout or a month away from eagle scout by time of college applications.
-Ought to have about 100 community service hours by college app time.
-Focusing on business related electives like Micro AP, Macro AP, and Stats AP for my senior year, aiming for finance or economics degree.
-Will be four years in our schools technical theatre program, one of top 5 in nation. Several hundred hours put into here. Job expirience coming from here too, as the schools theatre uses exclusively paid students as staff when outside parties come to rent out the theatre.
-1 year vice president in the organization.
-2 years as cameraman for the school's videocrew that follows the football games, very advanced for highschool.
-1 year in extracurricular track and sprinting.
-Weakest in mathematics, strong in history and science.</p>

<p>Too big a reach? Will early action help improve my chances?</p>

<p>Early action will weaken your chances. EA is for very strong candidates.
It’s hard to give you any chance without any ACT/SAT score.
GPA seems a little low but maybe difficulty of classes and the quality of your school could make up for it.
Hard to chance without any test scores though.</p>

<p>How can early action be bad ? I dnt understand when is the best time to send in the application. What determines if you should do early action ?</p>

<p>It appears that in the case of ND they want their Early Action candidates to be the very strongest applicants…</p>

<p>from the ND admissions website:</p>

<p>“Because the Admissions Committee is unable to extend all of its offers of admission in the Early Action process, it is highly conservative when making Early Action admission decisions. The Admissions Committee advises students to apply in the Early Action process only if they are in the very top ranges of our applicant pool.”</p>

<p>[Deadlines</a> // Admissions // University of Notre Dame](<a href=“http://admissions.nd.edu/admission-and-application/prospective-first-year-students/deadlines/]Deadlines”>http://admissions.nd.edu/admission-and-application/prospective-first-year-students/deadlines/)</p>

<p>Only the strongest candidates should apply early action. You are competing against the best of the best so if your application has any “weaknesses” it would be best to apply RD where the pool may not be as competitive. However, it seems that everyone applies EA somewhere so I think that the pool is becoming diluted with average applications in recent years. An average application would probably get deferred to RD should they apply EA. In your case it is hard to say without SAT/ACT but your grades seem kind of low for ND. Good Luck</p>

<p>What about catholic church involvement? No, of course you do not have to be a long time parish member, or even catholic, but it doesn’t hurt. ND also loves to see community service missions…(Uganda, Haiti New Orleans etc.)</p>

<p>I made a 198 on PSAT. I’m taking a SAT class. What would chances be assuming around a 2100?</p>

<p>It’s all on test scores. I applied early action with nothing more than a good ACT score and they accepted me.</p>