Cumulative GPA: 4.1364
Rank: 3 / 461
7th Grade
8th Grade
9th Grade (Final Grades)
Extracurriculars
@threesapphires23 , your grades are fine…(congratulations on the hard work! )but grades are only the starting point for any top school with holistic admissions. Keep it up, but don’t stress unduly over the difference between, say, a 98 and a 99%. That’s not what would, or would not get you into any top school! It’s. also important to do things outside of academics that engage you on a deep and genuine level.
The overall balance and rigor of your course selection, test scores, recommendations, extracurriculars and essays are all important. Then there are things you have little-to-no control over that have a big impact on admissions because admissions officers are not just looking to check off whether any individual applicants is qualified. They are trying to put together a well-rounded class with a certain number of different types of applicants with regard to diversity of talents, personalities, interests, race, gender, home state, socio-economic factors, etc. So, if you are play the french horn at a high level and you are from Wyoming, and the school does not yet have a French horn musician and wants more students from unrepresented Western states, your chances might be greater than an equally-qualified applicant who is from New Jersey and plays violin. Whether you’re a recruited athlete, or whether your parents attended the school and donated millions of dollars also has an outsized affect on your chances. So getting rejected is more of the norm (even for outstanding students) and says nothing derogatory about you.
With all of these issues, it’s a wonder anyone gets admitted without a strong hook. Ivies are also not the best “fits” for everyone, or necessarily considered the “best” schools for every major. Each Ivy League school is different (It’s just a sports league, after all). Apply if you must…but have lots of good-fit match and safety schools on your list, no matter how great your qualifications are.
Thank you so much. I know I need to work harder on my ECs lol.
You now have 4 threads as a rising 10th grader all around how to get into super-selective colleges. You have a lot of good advice on those threads- and yet you are still looking for reassurance. Guessing sitting home in Covid world is leaving you time and energy to stew.
It is genuinely hard for students right now: so many of the usual channels are not possible. Summer jobs / internships / team sports / camps / etc, etc range from limited to non-existant.
So, take a good dollop of imagination and some of this energy you have and find a way to do something constructive with it. It could be something to contribute to the greater good (there are a lot of options out there right now) or something that develops some genuine interest or skill of yours (there are communities online for just about every interest). You have a long summer ahead of you. Set yourself some goals and work towards them. It will be happier and more productive than stewing about things you can’t change (ie, your grade 9 grades) are going to keep you from a fancy brand that you think you are going to want in 3 years.
You look like you’re on a great track so far, but it might be a little early to rate your stats for admission to Ivies and UVA – you don’t have the stats you’ll need for college admissions yet (ACT/SAT, high school GPA). Universities won’t look at your middle school grades. Keep it up on this track for the next few years though.
You’re still almost two years away from even thinking about that. Just keep getting the best grades you can. And, for goodness sake, don’t let your life revolve around getting into these schools! You have better things to get stressed out over than a school with a 95% rejection rate.
^^^ This.
Your stats after your freshman year are meaningless if you are looking for indications as to whether you will be accepted to some extremely popular college. All that your freshman stats will tell you is about how rigorous your courses should be for the optimal rigor/GPA combination for yourself.
Don’t go wasting your high school years in doing things on the slight chance that you will be accepted to colleges which you only know through stories and anecdotes.
College is the next part of your life journey after high school, not a life goal. Despite what half the people around you may say, high school is not about getting into college.
High school is about developing the skills and acquiring the self knowledge required to decide what to do for your next stage in life. The entirety of the focus you should have on colleges is to know how many years of math, sciences, English, and foreign language you will need in order to have the widest selection of colleges from which to choose.
You should not be starting high school and saying “what do I need to do in order to be accepted to the most prestigious colleges in the USA?”. What should be happening is that, as a rising senior, you should be looking back over your previous three years and saying “OK, based on how well I did, and how rigorous my curriculum was, and on my interests and how much I invested in my ECs, etc, at which colleges, which my parents can afford, will I succeed and thrive the most?”
Admissions to a “prestigious” colleges is not a prize for doing well in high school. That is a myth which has resulted in tens of thousands of stressed out, unhappy teens, thousands of bitter, disappointed high school graduates, and hundreds of stressed out unhappy colleges students.
The extremely selective colleges are one of many trajectories for students who enjoyed taking extremely challenging classes, and were able to do very well in those classes, while also engaging heavily in multiple high intensity extracurricular activities.
However, most of these students are not accepted to one of these colleges or their parents cannot afford them.
For students who found it more difficult to maintain high grades in very rigorous classes while engaging in many high intensity ECs, or for whom doing so put them under immense mental and physical stress, these colleges are probably not a very good trajectory. Luckily, these are about 20-30 of the hundreds of excellent colleges that are available for students of all interests, all levels of academic, artistic, social, etc, skill levels, different interests, different preferences in environment and social settings, etc.
You don’t know what you will want, what your interests will be, your strengths and weaknesses, etc. So focusing on a set of colleges which have the single common factor of having low acceptance rates, instead of focusing on your high school studies and activities is a waste of your time, effort, and of your high school years.
Do your best in your classes and extracurricular activities, start researching colleges, based on your interests and preferences, and, at the end of your Junior year, put together a list of colleges which match you persona preferences, requirements, and which seem good fits, based on what your academic and EC records look like.
PS. your middle school activities and grades are meaningless, once you’ve started high school.
You have good academics but you’re only a freshman. Find some unusual extracurricular and become as good/involved at it as you possibly can
Final Grades:
Health and PE 9: 100.06%
Pre IB WH/GEO: 98.97%
Pre IB Biology: 99.50%
Pre IB English 9: 100.18%
Pre IB French II: 97.53%
Pre IB Algebra II/Trig: 99.23%
Economics and Personal Finance: 100.00%