Decision: Deferred
Objective:
SAT I (breakdown): 2190 superscored - old SAT
ACT (breakdown): 32 (33 superscored)
Unweighted GPA (out of 4.0): 3.75 / 4.08 weighted
Rank (percentile if rank is unavailable): school doesn’t rank
AP (place score in parenthesis): APUSH (4), AP World History (5), AP Lang/Comp (5)
Senior Year Course Load: AB Calc, AP Gov, AP Lit, AP Spanish, AP Art, Human Anatomy, PoliSci
Major Awards (USAMO, Intel etc.): AP Scholar w/ honors, a few local ones
Subjective:
Extracurriculars (place leadership in parenthesis): Varsity Crew, NHS, NArtHS, NSpanishHS
Job/Work Experience: summer lifeguard job (full-time)
Volunteer/Community service: 2 Dominican Republic mission trips, NHS volunteer tutoring elementary schoolers during school year
Essays (rating 1-10, details): Common App (9/10, was told it was great by many people, showed my creativity and well-written), UVA personal essays (7/10 & 8/10, wasn’t too confident in the first one as it was a bit quirky)
Recommendations (rating 1-10, details):
Teacher Rec #1: (10/10, APUSH teacher, teacher of the year, engaging class)
Teacher Rec #2: (10/10, Lang/Comp teacher, english department head, knows me well)
Counselor Rec: (7/10, new counselor for my senior year, don’t know him well)
Other
Applied for Financial Aid?: no
Intended Major: Economics (Liberal Arts)
State (if domestic applicant): VA in-state
School Type: large, competitive NOVA public
Ethnicity: white
Gender: male
Income Bracket: >$200,000
Hooks (URM, first generation college, legacy etc.): none
Reflection
Strengths: ACT, SAT, Common App essay, teacher recs, a lot of hours into my extracurriculars/volunteering
Weaknesses: GPA for sure, competitive in-state school, maybe personal essays?
Why you think you were accepted/waitlisted/rejected: I honestly thought I had a good shot at getting in, UVA accepts ~40 students each year from my school and I assumed I had the stats for it to be a match, my GPA was a pretty big weakness. I’ve written better personal essays to other schools; after applying to my RD schools I am confident I could write better ones to UVA now that I have the experience.
Where else were you accepted/waitlisted/rejected: UMich (EA, deferred), Dartmouth (ED, rejected)
General Comments: Pretty upset… I had my hopes up, being in-state, where I thought I had a good chance since the acceptance rate inside VA is around 45%. Another deferral since my UMich letter is a kick to the confidence, for sure. I hate the wait. Hopefully this is helpful for any prospective applicants reading this!