Pls help me shortlist colleges. Cornell ED vs Stanford EA

College Search & Selection
1

Int’l student in Indian

Major: Computer Science

Grades:
Class 9: 75% [Deflated]
Class 10 [ICSE]: 95%
Class 11: 84.2% & 83.4% [Deflated]
Class 12 [CBSE]: 97% Predicted
[Had my counselor explain grade deflation in both the transcripts]
Class Rank: Top 5-10%

Test Scores:
SAT: 1430 + 6/7/6 Essay (Jan) and 1500 + 6/5/6 Essay (May)
SAT Math II: 800
SAT Physics: 800
AP CS A: 5
AP Calc BC: 5
AP Phy C Mech: 5

Essays: Idk I’m still working on them but they’re going to be pretty strong. Might turn out to be phenomenal.

ECs:


[QUOTE=""]

Competitive Programming. Qualified for the Indian National Olympiad in Informatics twice. Was deemed qualified for the national training camp. Recognition in a ton of no-name competitions. Was invited to a couple selective competitive programming summer camps.
Founder & Lead Dev, Empathize: We’re building an AI-powered therapist chatbot. Have received significant interest from investors we’ve met.
Internship with a social org. Can’t give away specifics. My role was significant in one of its initiatives.
Deep Learning. Worked on numerous personal projects. Research on one-shot learning and synthetic gradients (Most of my work is unpublished, shall describe in the additional info section of the app.)
Published work on conversational AI in an international journal
Self-Taught Therapist. Listens to sexual assault survivors and lgbt youth online. Helps them with their personal problems. ← theme of my CommonApp essay
Amateur Keyboardist. Awesome LoR from music teacher of prev school, where I went in 9th and 10th grades. Performed in many school events and a couple interschool competitions. [Two of the events received some press coverage if that matters]
Hosted an online programming contest that received over 300 participants from over 10 countries.

[/QUOTE]

LORs
Dope LoRs from CS and Music Teachers; Good-ish ones from English teacher and Math teacher (who’ll be acting as my counselor).

I NEED A TON OF AID. I can pay like 15-20k a year.

Please help me prepare a list of safety and target schools to apply to. Also, should I apply ED to Cornell or EA to Stanford?

Thanks

2

Your scores are amazing! Cornell shouldn’t be a problem for a student like you, and I don’t think applying ED would be a bad idea! Your grades are certainly fit for Stanford, but Stanford is strangely particular about the students they choose…in a sense that they want you to be very well-rounded/good at everything…playing sports, instruments, in STEM (you seem to be very strong in), and in the arts (which is unfortunately quite impossible for most people) Nevertheless, i think you should give Stanford a shot, you have a solid chance!

3

@livingthings You should be competitive for both schools. Obviously Cornell is a safer bet than Stanford, but still a reach for anyone so you never know. Stanford is a crapshoot for anyone. Neither of these schools are need-blind for international students but Stanford probably has a bigger financial aid budget given that it is a significantly richer school than Cornell.

4

I would not apply anywhere ED. You should want the ability to compare financial offers from different schools.

Since aid is important you should look through this site (but be should to sure to check with each school to see if there is any updated information) http://automaticfulltuition.yolasite.com/

5

What is your unweighted overall GPA and your weighted GPA? Am I missing something? Was your average freshman year a C?

6

@Emsmom1 No, that’s not how it works in my high school. The scores are severely deflated and fewer than ten percent of the student score in more than 70%.

7

Oh, I didn’t see you were an international student. Sorry about that.