Please help me understand

Applying to College Admission Stories
1

Hi! I will be starting as a college freshman in the fall. I will be attending an in-state public university as part of the honors program. While I in no way mean to disparage this wonderful school, it was by no means my 1st (or 6th) choice, and I was hoping to be accepted to at least one of the other high match/reach schools I applied to. If you could help me shed some light on where my greatest weaknesses where in my application, I would very much appreciate it!

STATS:

Personal: White female, upper middle class

SAT: 2300; 800 reading, 790 writing, 710 math
SAT II: 740 spanish, 730 chemistry, 720 biology E

ACT: 34; 36 writing, 36 reading, 32 math, 32 science

AP: two 4s sophomore year, two 5s and two 4s junior year (two 5s, a 4, and a 2-3 anticipated for senior year)

Unweighted GPA: 4.00 with almost all AP and honors classes (AP not offered fresh. year at my school)

Sports: Track 4 years, varsity for 2; cross country 2.5 years, varsity for 2

Music: played string instrument for 8 years; member of school’s top audition-based orchestra since sophomore year, which qualified to compete at State and scored among the top 5-10 all 3 years.

Other ECs: Science Olympiad (placed twice at regionals Jr. yr), won category at a multi-state science/engineering competition jr. yr, environmental club (officer) sr. yr, music honor society sr. yr, volunteer club since soph. yr, Spanish tutor all 4 years, Job shadowed a physician at a local clinic the summer before sr. yr.

Volunteering: several hundred hours (including summers) working with young children and disabled children/adults

I have won quite a few regional/state-wide awards, but my only national awards are PSAT commended scholar and AP Scholar with Distinction (the highest one - I think that’s what it’s called?)

RESULTS (I realize I was way too ambitious, and should’ve applied to a more reasonable mix):

Accepted:
In-state public, honors program
In-state private (high acceptance rate, merit scholarship)
OOS private (high acceptance rate, but with very competitive merit scholarship)

Waitlisted:
Brown (rejected)
Pomona (rejected)
Pitzer (accepted)
Williams (I’m assuming rejected, but I haven’t actually heard from them yet)

Rejected:
Stanford
Yale
Harvard

I realize that many of the schools I applied to are sort of (pardon my language) crap-shoots at best, but is there anything I could have done to strengthen my application? Is there anything I should focus on now during under-grad. in order to have a strong application when I apply for grad. school/med. school? Any help would be very, very much appreciated. I guess I’m looking for closure, mostly, but I also want to turn this experience into a lesson for the future. :slight_smile:

2

IMO you did nothing wrong except that you applied too many schools that are reaches for anyone. Your stats and ECs are excellent, but I’m guessing there was nothing that really distinguished you from the many other tremendous applicants to these schools. Universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown could fill up the class many times over and still have an outstanding student body. Your only mistake was in not having a more balanced application list. Now it is time to move on and embrace your college. The lesson going forward for for med school is that you should apply to a wide range of med schools and not just the top few med schools in the country.

3

You’re a competitive applicant and those schools turn away lots of qualified kids. I wouldn’t dwell on the past - it seems like you did lots of things and had a fulfilling high school experience. For college, explore the opportunities your school has, try lots of things, find a few you like, and do a lot with those few. For grad/med apps, talk to the advisers at your college about courses to take and make a plan. Study hard, get good grades, and try to work with professors to do research/write papers. At the same time, know that college is about way more than just classes, and do fun things that help you grow as a person.

Good luck!

4

Happy1 – thank you for your response! That is very kind of you. Do you think there is anything I should focus on improving in the future?

5

Thanks An0maly!

6

I’m bewildered myself, because my son was accepted to Pitzer with significantly lower stats (3.3-3.4 unweighted GPA/weighted approximately 4.0; 2060 SAT/31 ACT). It could be their gender ratio, or other uncontrollable factors. They had not accepted anyone from his school in recent years, although they had waitlisted some. They sent an interviewer to the campus (it’s a private boarding school) last fall, and the school’s head college counselor had a heart-to-heart about how similar the school’s mission was to Pitzer’s. My son was also involved in a lot of leadership positions, and probably had outstanding recommendations. They did not offer him a cent in financial aid, though, and he chose to go somewhere else.

7

woogzmama - I feel bewildered about everything to do with the college process! :slight_smile: I was unable to interview for Pitzer, so I doubt that helped much. Congrats to your son though! I hear you on the price, too – eek.

8

Waitlist at Brown/Pomona/Williams, and rejected at Stanford/Yale/Harvard means that you are close, but not quite. I would say your SAT II/AP scores. They sort of say that you didn’t do as well as your grades indicate. People going to Stanford/Yale/Harvard tend to have close to 800/5 on the subjects. And you don’t have any national award to make up for that.

Having said that, don’t worry about it. Going to Stanford/Yale/Harvard or not won’t make that much a difference when you apply to medical school. It may even be easier to go to a state school and do well there. So other than some hurt pride, you are not losing much. Good luck.

9

The only problem I really see here is something that’s already been mentioned - too many eggs in the reach basket. It seems like when you came off the top end, you got accepted, which many students in your situation find happens. But you had few to no schools ranked 10-30 on the national list and other than Pitzer, nothing below #4 on the LAC list. That gets you tossed in the safety basket.

Not that it’s any comfort, but there are a bunch of students with stats similar to your that this happened to this year, as it does more and more every year. Family friend with stats that blew away everybody, ACT 36 with two 800 SAT IIs, wound up at JHU, and although it’s probably the best place for him since he got in a very prestigious program, he’s still shell shocked that he was rejected by every Ivy and Stanford - he was fortunate his parents forced him to apply to some schools off the top so he had a choice of where to go.

Best advice for anyone in this situation is spread your college selection net wider. Do not assume that top stats mean that you should only apply to the top schools, sprinkle a few further down the list in, even if that means expanding your list to 12-15 schools if you insist on applying to that many top schools. And use EA/Rolling Admissions to set a floor early - surely there is one school you can apply to, even if restricted by SCEA, that you would be happy to go to that you can get in before Jan. 1.

10

To put it in baseball terms, you were swinging mostly at pitches out of the strike zone.

You should have expanded your list just a tiny bit.

Apply to Williams, but also Wesleyan or Middlebury.

Apply to Brown, but also WUSTL or Brandeis.

Apply to Stanford, but also to Berkeley or Duke.

Apply to Yale, but also Cornell or Columbia.

11

Thank you all for your replies. In retrospect, it sure seems obvious that I was a little cheeky with my list!