Weird wait listed at UCSC my 3.85/4.2 kid got into bio no problems as did many friends
Yep. But many school districts prohibit it.
Wasn’t aware of this at all. My school and all neighboring ones that I know of have ties with local CCs so kids can take free classes. I think some states have running start and such, too.
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But do the CC count towards HS credit?
Our school district union negotiated that HS students could NOT enroll in CC courses if said course was taught at their local HS!
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That is the rule at our HS as well.
UC Decisions
OOS, UW GPA 4.0, Weighted 4.75
2 Varsity Sports and Leadership positions in school and club sport
Accepted -Cognitive Science Major - UCSD, UCI, UCSC, UCD, UCR
Waitlisted - UCLA
Rejected - UCB and UCSB
Deciding between UCI and UCSD at this time
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Yeah, she was pretty bummed about that one. She really liked UCSC. Congrats to your kid!
If you can take the cc classes, even with no high school credit they will count for college credit if UC transferable. I think that really helped to boost the a-g credits and overall fully weighted gpa. Accepted all UC’s aside from waitlisted UCLA. No big hook, long term dedicated EC’s, wrote college essays with no help from a counselor. That may have helped to show perspective from a young person. Long time job. All the basics and it resonated. Average excellent student with great grades, AP scores, normal awards but with a genuine personality that shined through in the PIQ’s.
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Nope, not at my HS.
Apparently you can appeal?
S23
4.44 weighted (4.1) uc gpa
10 AP/ plus 4 DE
Lots of EC
Lots of volunteering
PIQs: decent
Founder of local soccer camp for low income kids
Founder of school investment club
4 year school athletics (3-year varsity)
4 year club soccer
Summer employment at tech company
Rejected: [UCSD], [UCSB], UCLA, UCI], [UCB]
Waitlisted: UCD
Accepted [UCSC], UCR
Not sure what went wrong. He’s devastated beyond belief and can’t seem to come to terms of what has happened. The system is definitely broken and needs to be fixed. Especially if two generations of your whole family went to [UCSB] and you get rejected. Amazing!
I also want to add that for the future, for those of us who have other kids, we have to manage our expectations. School counselors and college entrance experts really have no clue when they are guiding you. School counselors are just doing their job. They will tell you you have a good shot here or there but in reality they have no clue. And college entrance experts are just here to capitalize on the business of college. Stats like my son’s were good but not great in the end. And that’s the reality in today’s college application world. We either have to accept it or just move on. 4.5 gpa kids and below really have very little chance in obtaining admission to top tier ucs. I might be wrong but that’s just my two cents.
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So sorry for your son. Not sure what to say and how to console my kid if that’s what happened to us.
Luckily my kid got accepted to all UCs she applied except Berkeley. She will attend UCLA in the fall.
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Do you mind sharing her stats?
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Your son is surely an amazing student. I’ve been wondering what his intended major was (if he stated one)?
Business
Gotta admit, S23 and I are still a bit stunned. We knew CS was a competitive major everywhere, but he applied to all UCs except Merced, selecting CS as his first choice major, and the results were not good:
UCI, UCB, UCR, UCSB: Rejected
UCLA, UCSD, UCD: Waitlisted
UCSC: Accepted (in Feb. round)
He also applied to Mudd, MIT, Caltech, Harvard, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon and was rejected everywhere except CMU, where he was waitlisted. These weren’t unexpected, but the UC results were. Thank goodness for Santa Cruz.
Basic stats:
GPA 3.97 unweighted, 4.55 weighted
SAT: 1530 (760V, 770M)
APs: 3 taken by sophomore year, then he transferred junior year to a school with no AP program, where he took 14 DE classes at the local CC, including math through multivariable calculus, linear algebra, discrete math, 3 semesters of college physics, and 4 courses in the CS department. To date he’s never gotten anything less than an A except in Spanish.
ECs: Founder/president of school programming club
Winner of the Congressional App Challenge for his district; top awards in a couple hackathons
1 year varsity athletics
Music (oboe, sax), with some regional awards
Summer job designing and creating a commercial app for a multinational company
Volunteering: nothing extraordinary
PIQs: We thought they were good, as did others who reviewed them, but who knows?
Statewide top 9% (but not ELC because he transferred into his current school in 11th grade, which had different rules from his old school)
Maybe his story and PIQs painted him as too one-dimensional and focused on Computer Science, but honestly I don’t know what else he could have done. This has been his passion and his dream since 7th grade, and he’s done a ton of coding in his spare time simply because he loves doing it. To have said otherwise in his PIQs would have been wrong.
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I feel for you. Especially with those stats. Nothing anything I can say will make it any better. But the cs major is out of control. As well as the whole uc system in general. It’s broken. Did he apply to cal poly? Maybe he got in there which is as good if not better than most of the ucs. It will be tough to pick up the pieces. We are still trying. But you guys are not at fault. Especially with the influx of foreign students clamoring to get their hands on cs degrees from us institutions. UCSC is good and if ever wants to transfer later he will have a good shot. I know it isn’t what you want to hear but this year was a real sh**t show in my opinion.
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Thanks for the kind words. He didn’t apply to Cal Poly, because we figured (on bad advice, apparently) that he’d get into a handful of UCs, and he liked the fact that the UCs are all research-focused universities. Santa Cruz is indeed good; he just wanted to ability to view a few campuses after the admissions cycle and make his own choice. Having the choice made for him makes him feel kind of powerless.
I don’t really blame any of the advice we got from school counselors and such. All they really had was the topline admissions numbers for each campus, and we know now that those don’t reflect anything like reality for impacted majors. I wish there was more information readily and publicly available from the UCs themselves so that we could make more informed decisions about where and how to apply. It’s beginning to seem as though the only sensible way through is to spend a huge amount of money applying to a ton of schools, and hire an admissions counselor to get better information. That seems completely insane (not to mention expensive).
If for some reason he doesn’t fall in love with UCSC and decides to transfer, does anyone know if the chances on transfer to impacted majors like CS are still significantly better than for freshman admission? He has enough credits to graduate in 3 years, so if he decided to transfer it would probably be soon.
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That’s so rough, and I’m sorry your son didn’t get more of the results you were all hoping for. It does seem like CS is just a different beast from the rest of college admissions, and a lot of advisors haven’t learned that yet. I wanted to drop a quick note of encouragement, though. I work at a tech startup in the bay area (not a household name, but one that more and more folks in our industry know about, with bright prospects), and one of my favorite new engineers is a UCSC alum. He’s incredibly sharp, and friendly. I’m so glad that we brought him in as an intern, then brought him back as an intern again, and then hired him when he graduated early. He’s had really positive things to say about his time at Santa Cruz — it sounds like he learned a ton and loved his time there.
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