Okay, after all this time reading through college confidential and bursting with anxiety, I’ll finally post here. I’m a California resident, female, Indian (subcontinent).
I’m only applying to schools in California, so I’m mostly looking at UCs when it comes to reach, match, and safety schools. The private schools I’m applying to are Stanford, Pomona, and USC. Maybe Occidental, but I don’t know. The list isn’t that long, but I may add some safeties to it. I’m mostly looking at UCLA and Berkeley, since the likelihood of me getting into Stanford is just too low and I’m not really going to stress myself out about it 
but the UCs are my main focus.
I plan to major in Psychology, since my mother is a psychologist and I’m really interested in the field.
GPA
- I’ve received the ELC letter at my school.
- Unweighted GPA: 4.0
- UC GPA: 4.31? → I’m a bit unsure about the UC GPA, since different calculators show different numbers. I only took 7 weighted courses from 10th to 11th grade, and got As in everything, so it shouldn’t really cap out, but I get 2 grades for each course I take, so there are technically 14 weighted As in my transcript. Can anyone tell me if that weighted GPA is correct?
TEST SCORES:
- ACT, 35 and 9 on writing first time, then 35 and 10 on writing second time.
- SAT Subject Round 1: 750 - Chem, 660 - Math 2 (calculator mishap :/), 660 - World History.
- SAT Subject Round 2: 770 - Math 2.
I haven’t looked at the UCs in regards to submitting SAT Subject scores, but I hope that I don’t have to submit the low scores in math and world history
HONORS AND DISTINCTIONS:
- AP Scholar with Distinction (the topmost one-- I took 6 AP exams and scored 4+ on all of them).
I’m really not too sure about more of these. I don’t have many specific academic honors… but I’ll check through and see if I can find more.
AP SCORES (If necessary?):
- World History: 4
- Chemistry, Calculus BC, Psychology, English Language, Biology - 5s
EXTRACURRICULARS:
- summer after 10th and 11th grade: volunteered with a research study at UCSD called ABCD (adolescent brain cognitive development study), was the only high school volunteer in 2016 and was one of four in 2017, and I volunteered there for over 100 hours each summer. I worked closely with research staff to help coordinate each of the 21 sites, gathering data and consolidating it with the Coordinating Center based in UCSD.
- starting 11th grade: Founder and President of my school’s NAMI on Campus club - a mental health club directly affiliated with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). I worked with my school to host “Yellow Ribbon Week,” which is suicide prevention week, as well as “Mental Health Month,” with Each Mind Matters, in may. Mental Health Month is an event that only officially occurs with a NAMI on-Campus club, and this event had not been hosted at my school until I created this club.
- Starting summer after 11th grade: Vice President of the Region Cabinet of our region for CASC - the California Association of Student Councils. This program consists of youth leaders that seek to make a change in their schools or in their communities.
- starting beginning of 11th grade: I’m a First Reader for Polyphony HS, a student-run literary magazine.
EVENTS AND ACTIVITIES:
- summer after 9th grade: participated in Academic Connections, a 3-week long program at UCSD Extension where I took and officially got an A in a course on Bioinformatics.
- Summer after 10th grade: participated in Academic Connections: Research Scholars, which is the same 3 week program at UCSD but instead I joined a graduate student in their research project and got to make a poster detailing the project and what we were doing in that project. The Research Scholars program is more selective than the Academic Connections program.
- 11th: I was part of the group of students to officially “receive” the ADL “No Place for Hate” banner at our school. The people to receive it were me, the president of ASB, and the leadership of our school’s GSA.
- 11th: I was published in my school’s award-winning literary magazine, “freeflight.”
- Yellow Ribbon Week - should I include that in events/activities?
- Mental Health Month - should I also include this?
- I participated in (and “won” in!) NaNoWriMo in November of 9th, 10th, and 11th grade, and won all three years. NaNoWriMo is when you write 50,000 words of a project in the span of a month. It’s not that great, but I guess it’s something?
- summer after 10th grade: I finished the first draft of a novel.
- summer after 11th grade: I finished the second draft of that novel.
I’m not sure what else to put in these sections. But that’s it.
For the essays, here’s what I plan to write about. I haven’t really figured out my common app essay, or my supplementals for any other colleges, but I know the general topic that I’ll write about for all my UC essays. I have a college counselor, and he explained that since my academics are very very excellent, that I should approach these essays as a way to “humanize” myself, to show the bigger picture of who I am and what I care about.
UC ESSAYS:
- “leadership:” I’ll write about my mental health club and my desire to work on eliminating the stigma around mental illness. I may describe a little bit of the work I do as president of my club, plus explaining my motivations behind it: several of my close friends have battled severe mental illness and I have always felt the strong desire to help them.
- “creativity:” I love writing fiction, and in this essay I’ll describe how writing fiction is therapeutic for me and how I use it to feel better, and to understand myself and others.
- “overcome an educational barrier:” I have moderate ADHD, so in this essay I talk about having ADHD and everything I’ve had to do to minimize the effects of its dysfunction in my life. (I’ll also subtly mention that I had zero accommodations - no extended time, no late deadlines, for anything - I don’t have a 504 or an IEP, or anything… I’ll be more subtle about it, though).
- Question number 8: I write about being a lesbian. I come from a super super supportive background, so I’m not turning my essay into some sob story about being gay. It’s just about a moment when I realized that being lesbian wasn’t just something I had to deal with, but something I could be proud of. Part of this essay is just for the sake of mentioning that I identify as a lesbian in there but it’s still very genuine and an important moment in my life.
Okay! Whew! That’s about it. I’m really really hoping to get into UCLA and/or Berkeley - the 2 people I’ve talked to (my neighbor is a college counselor, plus my own college counselor) have said that I could consider those two schools my match schools and not really reach schools, but of course I’m still going to be worried about it! I’m considering UCSD and USC my safeties (my mom is USC alum, so I’m likely to get massive scholarships and basically guaranteed acceptance, and my mom used to be faculty at UCSD and I’m very familiar with the campus so it’s a great safety school for me), and then my reach school would probably be Stanford, but tuition is kinda huge and I honestly liked Cal and UCLA better, I dunno why
Let me know if there’s any more information I could include! (I’m pretty sure that I included everything, though). THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING ALL OF THIS!! MAN, college applications are so stressful, how do people even get through it??? Thanks so much, again.