I am hoping to be admitted to Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.
My GPA is below the average (3.6, 4.2 weighted) but I have:
34 ACT
Editor-in-Chief school newspaper
- advisor of the paper is a Medill grad and he wrote me an excellent letter of recommendation
captain of a varsity sports team
strong service activity
held summer jobs and after school
accomplished musician
several other extracurriculars
I would prefer to apply regular decision. Although Medill is my first choice, I will not qualify for any $$ from Northwestern except loans and if I got lucky and scored some non-need based money from my other choices, that would make the decision harder. Will applying ED significantly improve my chances? What are my chances???
Thanks for any feedback/input
I heard that Northwestern likes to admit a lot of ED appicants (like 80%?) than RD, from my counselor. RD for Northwestern is just as competitive as Ivy league schools… perhaps even more??
Your act and ECs look good to me but im not sure about GPA system, I do IB and I know some ppl who got into Northwestern ED with act 32 points and like IB points with 41/42 out of 45.
What about your subject tests? You should do one in humanities side if your planning to major in areas of Journalism.
Dont trust me too much tho, Im just speaking from my experiences…
Last year, NU had 26% acceptance rate in ED (similar to Duke, UPenn, Cornell, and Dartmouth) but only around 7% in RD. Even after accounting for recruited athletes and potentially higher quality of applicants in ED, it is clear that it is much easier to get in ED.
It is my reading from last couple of years’ results thread (and thus based on a small sample of all applicants), but it seems that unless you increase diversity of the class in some fashion (e.g. minority, Pell grant, first generation student, woman interested in engineering, under-represented state, or others …), it is almost impossible to get in RD.