<p>National competitions help a lot. A few of my friends were okay students in high school (they had upward curves), but ranked in the top 200 in the nation on Chemistry, Physics, and Biology and got into a lot of schools, including Chicago. They want to see you as a true top person on a national scale. It's a much better indicator of how good you really are than a grade in high school. I know usually when people think about Chicago being a non-number application school, they think of essays, diversity, and passion, but another whole aspect is that they really try to look at how people do, in a ranking basis, with more than just SATs and GPAs.</p>
<p>What's your overall grade point average? Do you know your rank?</p>
<p>Noctua, it was essays, recommendations, and maybe an interview. Perseverance. I chose my thesis for my essay in December. I wrote four essays - 3 required and a supplemental which explained the numbers from my point of view. It was being able to say "Don't look at my 3.3 and 3.42, don't look at my ACT 28, look at what I've accomplished - look where I've come from, and where I am now ending my 2nd year in college at age 19. I revised all four of them up to 8 MAJOR revisions. They were reviewed by peers both at college and here on College Confidential. They were reviewed by 3 Ph.D. holding professors including a Chicago alumna over the course of 3 months. Those same professors wrote me letters of recommendation, including the Chicago alumna who told me that my letter "reads like a poem" and was a "no holds barred let this student in letter."</p>
<p>The essays took me from the middle of December to the middle of February to complete. I can send them to you if you'd like to read them - PM me. I really am proud of them and feel they are my best written work. My three recommendations were written by professors I had for more than one semester. #1 was written by someone I had four classes with(including Spring when I was applying), #2 was two, and #3(alumna) was two (including Spring.)</p>
<p>The interview may have helped, but my interviewer told me it can't help too much - not everyone gets them, they can't weigh it that heavily. Despite what people here on the UChicago board say, I wore a suit down to the Admissions office. I never even considered anything else, really. I didn't know people went to interviews at schools like that not in a suit. I was stressing about a lot of things with the interview, but not about what I was wearing. It was natural. </p>
<p>We talked about my high school experience, my first college search and what I learned from it, my college experience, why I wanted to transfer, where I applied for transferring, and why I was interviewing at Chicago which was my #1 choice instead of at Northwestern, which I did tell her I applied to. The interview went very well.</p>
<p>There's not much else to say - I say that it "had to be" the essays/recs/interview maybe because there really is nothing else. Not only was my HS/tests not too great, my college was mediocre as far as someone wanting not only to transfer to a school like UChicago, but transferring way UP and not across from a top tier school.</p>
<p>hey, all I can say is:</p>
<p>-Best of Outcomes-</p>