Reach, Match, and safties

GPA as of the end of junior year (not done with junior year; anticipated gpa): 3.64 UW // W 3.75
— gpa low due to a slow freshman year

Current Schedule:
Biology Honors
Gym CP (Everyone has CP gym)
Algebra 2 CP
AP Art History
USH II honors
English 11 honors
spanish 3 cp

Summer School: Either pre calc CP or Pre calc H

Planned Senior year schedule:
AP Bio
Gym
Calc H or BC Calc
Ap English
AP Psychology
AP Chem
AP Physics

Standardized tests:
Sat: 1520 (I just realized my old posts say 1540, I don’t know why it is a mistake!)
SAT Subject Tests:
Math II (780), chem (800) physics (800)
ACT: 32

Extracurricular Activities: (not sending all)
o 200 Hours volunteering (not sending)
o Founder of school science journal (President of the club)

  • conduct science ex
    o Pre-med president
    -Under my leadership pre med raised 2000$ for cancer research
    o Biology league (will update on awards)
    o Raised $3,000 to build water wells in africa (important to me because one of my biggest inspirations Philip Emeagwali grew up in a poverty area in Africa with no water and very little food and it affected his lifestyle negatively and I want children to not worry about food and water and focus on academics and enjoying their life. health care and food should be a right not a privilege)
    o Summer job at a clinic
    o I write for my local newspaper
    o I am a part of the school newspaper and if I get a position, I will send that in

Colleges:
cornell
columbia
Umass amherst
penn state
nyu
JHU
tufts
brown (my moms friend teaches there, idk if i should get in touch w her)
northeastern
tcnj
Boston U
CMU
Vanderbuilt
duje
MSU
Rutgerts Newark
Syracuse
notre dame
lehigh
Hunter College
Northwestern

Forgot to add Steven’s institute of technology

The name of the university is Stevens Institute of Technology, not “Steven’s”.

This is my opinion from what you posted here and you shouldn’t base your decisions on this because there are many other factors you forgot (APs, financial aid, sex, state, major, honors…):

Reach: Columbia, CMU (especially if you are a male CS applicant), Duke, JHU, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Cornell, Brown, Northeastern

Match: NYU, Tufts, Boston, Lehigh

Safety (if you can get your GPA up): Syracuse, UMass, Penn State, SIT, TCNJ, Rutgers, MSU, Hunter, Northeastern

comments: I can’t say for sure because your GPA is not set, my observations are based on that your GPA will increase, not decrease or remain the same. Good luck.

Stevens is not a safety. It is a high match/reach. Stevens is more selective than Northeastern for example that you identify as a reach.

Tufts is a reach and Northeastern and Stevens are matches

You have a lot of reaches, most of which look very unlikely to me. However, you also have quite a few sensible matches which may border on safeties depending upon things like whether you are in-state. I have never heard of “duje”. However, if you instead apply to Duke it would be a reach.

Your high school schedule for next year looks quite challenging. I think that you should try to get your applications in very early since you are going to need to limit the amount of time you spend on the college search next year in order to focus time on studying for all of those AP science classes. You might want to consider cutting back on one or two APs. Remember that the college search thing will take up a lot of your time and effort next year.

Personally, I would cut back significantly on the reaches. Between Duke, Northwestern, CMU, Columbia, Brown and Cornell I think that you should cut most of them.

Also, I think that you should run the NPC on every school on your list and cut back on the unaffordable ones. It would not surprise me if this were to eliminate NYU and BU.

Between these two cuts you should be able to get your list down to 15 or less while still maintaining most of the match schools on your list. I would specifically leave Rutgers, UMass Amherst, and TCNJ and probably MSU on the list. Hopefully at least one of these is in-state.

Reach: Columbia, CMU (especially if you are a male CS applicant), Duke, JHU, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Cornell, Brown, Northeastern

Match: NYU, Tufts, Boston, Lehigh, Northeastern, Syracuse, UMass, Penn State, , Rutgers

I dont know much about the rest. Chance me back on my most recent post please?

Don’t know why @WildChicken and @User1555 think Tufts is a match while Northeastern is a reach; it’s definitely the other way around. Tufts’s average acceptance rate of 14% and Northeastern’s 28%, along with Tufts’s average ACT of 33 and Northeastern’s average of 31, means that it’ll be much more difficult to gain admission to Tufts.

Reach: cornell,columbia, brown, Northwestern, Vanderbuilt, JHU, Duke, notre dame
Match: CMU, nyu, tufts, Umass amherst
Safety: Boston U, penn state, northeastern, Syracuse, lehigh, Hunter College, MSU

@potentialtransfer2018 They never said that NorthEastern is a reach, they said that NorthWestern is a reach.
@kcasssuu None of those schools are safeties, except maybe Hunter, They frequently reject applicants they sense are using them as safeties.

@TomSrOfBoston don’t know what you’re reading, but the posters I tagged both clearly listed Northeastern AND Northwestern as reaches, which I find odd.

@TomSrOfBoston Within the list of colleges that this student provided, I would say that the schools I listed could be safties. (since those schools are easier to get in comparing to other schools.)

@kcasssuu

That is not what a safety is. A safety is a school you are virtually guaranteed to be admitted to.

bump

bump

@potentialtransfer2018 Just for the sake of accuracy, 31 is not the average ACT for Northeastern. For class of 2021, Northeastern’s middle 50 percentile range for admitted students is ACT 32-34, according to the admissions website. For class of 2020, Northeastern’s middle 50 percentile range for enrolled students is ACT 31-34 according to the CDS. More from the Northeastern 2016-17 CDS:

For both classes of 2020 and 2021, Tuft’s middle 50 percentile range for enrolled students is also ACT 31-34 according to the CDS. More from the Tufts 2016-17 CDS: