First of all, thank you for reading this post. I’m trying to do my best but I really need your advices. In order to make it easier, I will list everything out in bullet points. So here we go:
Identity and Background: I'm Asian, female. I came to US when I was 15 and have been living with a host family. I lost my father when I was 15, and had been going through many hardships. But I've learned a lot, and became more mature. (I wrote my personal statement about this) The school I go to is an all-girl school, which ranked #1 last year in our state. Really competitive, really privileged, all overachievers.
Scores: GPA 3.6 out of 4.0. Almost all the courses I took are Honors ( we don't offer AP), and everything was fine until my junior year. I took the hardest courses, and I ended up with two B+. They were extremely hard, and I had a long time struggle + depression because of these courses. But it turned out to be that our class average was B for both of the classes.
ACT: 34
TOEFL: 110
SAT II: Math 750 Literature 750 Korean 750 (I speak Mandarin, and English fluently, took French at school for 4 years, and learned Korean by myself. Recently I just started learning Arabics at school)
Extracurriculums:
a. Established my own business with my friends, aiming on helping international students. Also the editor-in-chief of an online publication, writing pieces in both Chinese and English.
b. Amnesty International Club Head
c. Varsity Dance team co-captain
d. Young Scholars Program at Upenn. Took undergraduate class, and earned a 4.0 GPA college credit.
e. Summer program at Columbia University in Creative Writing and summer program at New York Times, reporting issues on immigrants in NYC.
f. Deca International business club, won nationals last year.
g. Model Congress member
h. School Newspaper staff writer
i. volunteer at local hospital
What I'm doing now and dreams: I want to be a journalist, and do reporting on international issues. I know my GPA is not good enough, but I can make sure straight As on Senior first semester. I have never thought that I was going to be good enough for Harvard, but my college consoler said that I might have a chance and I should try. But I really don't know.
You seem like a wonderful applicant, as are most students who will ultimately be rejected. As Harvard receives more qualified applications than they have seats in their freshman class, Admissions uses a student’s teacher recommendations, guidance counselor’s Secondary School Report (SSR), Essays and Interview Report to choose one high performing student over another. They look for wonderful scholars of “good character” – that’s an old fashioned word meaning the way you develop your inner qualities, intellectual passion, maturity, social conscience, concern for community, tolerance, inclusiveness and love of learning. And none of those qualities can be gleaned from a post like yours.
FWIW: International applicants do NOT have the same odds as US applicants. Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford and MIT (among other colleges) limit the number of international students to about 10% to 11% of an incoming freshman class. That means that Harvard admits about 160 to 190 international students per year – and most of those students are from 6 countries: Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, China, Japan and Korea. To see how many students from your country are currently attending Harvard, go to: http://www.hio.harvard.edu/statistics. From the pull-down menus, select STUDENTS, HARVARD COLLEGE (the undergraduate school) and YOUR COUNTRY. Be sure to divide that number by 4 to get an idea of about how many students are admitted each year from your country.
Harvard doesn’t publish the number of applications from each country, but there could be more than 1000 students applying to Harvard from your country in any given year for a limited number of slots. To be admitted you have to be the best-of-the-best from your country. Those are terrible odds, no matter what your stats.
Thank you for all these informations! So just want to clarify a little, Harvard is more looking into the characters of the students, instead of “perfect scores” right? Cause the only thing that worries me is my GPA… Do you think it is going to drag me down?
I think you should definitely try! Write an interesting essay about your transition, especially since it shows your writing ability (with your aspiration of becoming a journalist, this is quite relevant). You should weigh it carefully if you want to use do Early Action for Harvard though or try it in the RD round. Good luck : )
OP, you are providing way too much personal information in public. It would be a piece of cake to identify exactly who you are and where you go to school, and I don't think you want that. I hope there's some way to delete this thread. You should kill this account and start over with a new username.
Since I am 99% sure I know where you go to school, I am 99% sure that the first-rate, experienced college advising staff there can give you much more precise and nuanced advice than you will get here about how competitive you are as an applicant at Harvard or elsewhere. You are obviously a strong student and a great candidate, but, as gibby points out, so are many people Harvard rejects, especially international students. Your school regularly sends students to all of the top colleges; it should not be hard for you to get a sense of how you compare to girls in the past couple of classes and your own class.