Does the school she has been admitted to have an honors program? If so, and if she hasn’t already done so, she should definitely apply for it.
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Also, you mention a weighted GPA of 4.6, but a lot of schools will recalculate and base decisions on an unweighted GPA. So that may have played a role.
And I definitely second the advice upstream to show CWRU a lot of love. Open the emails, follow the links. As a parent, open the emails they send you, too. Case tracks all of this and they take demonstrated interest into account.
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AS others have noted out of state CS is extremely competitive. GA Tech describes what they are looking for on their website, and it includes things that you did not list in the summary. For example, what did your daughter do that fits with the “Contribution to Community” evaluation criteria?
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I wouldn’t worry about your daughter. She will land at a school that is comparable to GT. This sounds like yield protection to me. I am sure there are OOS candidates that are possibly weaker than her.
The only other possibility is that her reccs may have some surprises.
Wouldn’t hurt to think through and submit one or two additional reccs for the RD schools. Reccs should be effusive. Not formulaic.
I am assuming that she checked all of the other boxes – a) X years of history, b) Y years of foreign language etc – whatever GTech cares about. Some kids skimp on that as they think GTech only cares about Math and CS.
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As @Data10 mentions the contribution to community aspect is huge at GT Once you get above a certain academic level they are looking at these sorts of things - it is a very holistic review - and give great weight to it.
There are roughly 3600 entering freshman out of a pool of almost 54,000. Stats are not the whole picture and test scores are very much not a focus over the past couple of years. I do think they really are trying to craft a diverse and complementary class.
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A lot of schools (perhaps most) care about how much you care about the community you are a part of. And they want that written about in the reccs.
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This is not an expectation that colleges have, they know many LoR writers have literally no idea what they are doing.
Now that ChatGPT is ready and willing to write good LoRs, hopefully the schools that require LoRs (which is really a relatively small proportion) will stop that practice.
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Nobody expects anything. It is up to you to present yourself in the most credible manner. And asking your recommenders to speak to your passion for the community is the smart thing to do, rather than make unsupported claims in your application.
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It’s certainly why it’s smart to give the reviewer a resume or something to help them know you better than just what they see at school. They can’t possibly know everyone or even anyone well they are writing about outside of one or two dimensions.
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If this is allowed. Some colleges are very specific…they don’t want this.
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No evidence of GT yield protect at all. Many very qualified and capable students are rejected by GT each every year simply because GT is difficult to get in. Especially for CS, OOS admission rate is around 5%, GT cannot admit every qualified student.
To say that a student with high stats gets rejected by GT is due to yield protection, is an insultation to those equally qualified students who are accepted. Do you imply those who are accepted are not good enough and have no chance to be admitted to MIT or Stanford? Or do you really believe GT’s AOs are rejecting every student they consider too good for GT?
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I’ve never read that. Perhaps not at our colleges of choice.
Both kids were asked by teachers for them so they could ensure they were capturing them beyond what they directly knew. In hindsight we should have thought of it without the request.
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You can give resumes to your teachers and school counselors so they will know things you have done. But colleges…some do not allow additional resumes to be sent.
This is what I meant in my reply above.
I am simply saying the OPs DD has better stats than most than many that have been accepted. But I have not seen the full app and even if I did, it is hard to know why one kid makes it and the other one does not. Perhaps GT yield protects, perhaps they do not.
If they do, it has nothing to do with your son who has very good stats.
Try not to take offence at everything, life will be more enjoyable!!
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At one point in an article in the alumni magazine Stanford said that about 80% of applicants are academically qualified for admissions, and to do well as students at Stanford. They accept closer to 4% of applicants. I have heard that 85% of applicants to MIT are academically qualified to attend. They are also now accepting something like 4% of applicants. For out of state students, I would expect that GAtech would have a similar number of well qualified applicants, and be similarly very, very hard to get accepted to.
“What went wrong” is just that there are too many very well qualified applicants. That really is it. I do not think that there is any point at trying to figure out anything more detailed than this.
Working in high tech, the strongest coworkers that I have ever worked with came from a very, very wide range of universities. My best coworkers from Rutgers or U.Mass are just as exceptional as my best coworkers from MIT and Stanford. Your daughter can get a very good education at any one of a very, very wide range of universities. Hopefully she has a solid safety and will get some very good acceptances. If she is already in at a “top 60” university then she will do well, and there will be other exceptional students at any top 60 or even top 200 university.
You will also find that highly ranked graduate programs accept students from a very wide range of undergraduate schools. If your daughter is headed to a “top 100” university, and if she does very well there and gets good internship or research or coop or job experience, then a top ranked master’s program is also still an option (although it is also likely to be unnecessary for a CS major).
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Yes. The teachers asked for more so they could write more than just he’s in my class, raises his hand and is a fine student.
A synopsis in advance to the teacher - ie what @neela1 said - present yourself credibly. Helping the teacher understand the full you is part of that process.
Fortunately they asked my kids. My kids didn’t offer.
this! GT gives great weight to the contribution to community question. This is why my S19 figured, even instate, with great stats, he would be deferred and possibly denied. He ended up at RIT (ED so he pulled his GT app and never knew what they would have decided) and has a great job right now, graduating in 3 years. Now my D17 who applied (not to CS )was weak academically and was wait listed, where we expected a full denial. She was very community centered, and her main essay talked about how involvement in a camp for low income kids that even to this day she is very passionate about.
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It’s the cap on out-of-state students + yield protection. No need to overthink it. She’ll have great choices in RD.
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Exactly! My deferred/waitlisted/transfer pathway kid had academics that were plenty strong to be admitted and similar to my other two kids who ultimately were admitted. Unlike the other two, his involvement and extracurriculars were weak - year long sport and some volunteer hours. The other two had the grades but also leadership (this is a big one), academic ECs like Model UN and Mock Trial, played a sport or two and one did all that plus had a part time job during the school year and plays an instrument. Hindsight being 20/20, I can look back at all three applications and the decisions made by Georgia Tech make sense.
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It is seriously hard for students (& their parents!) who are superstars at their school to realize just how many superstars there are competing for these slots. It is also hard for them to believe that schools try to balance cohorts, and really do look for kids who will fit.
The OP’s daughter has applied to ~20 unis, of which so far she has 1 acceptance (safety), 2 EA deferrals (MIT & CWRU) and 1 rejections (GaTech). OP, you and she should expect that she has at least 10 more rejection letters coming, as likely as not more. Prepare for that!
ps, I wonder if GaTech stung b/c it doesn’t have the social prestige of some of the other names she applied to, so psychologically it felt like a lower-tier was rejecting her?
pps, if she ends up with multiple acceptances, the tables turn and she has to write to all but one of them to say ‘thanks but no thanks’ - OP, be prepared for that to be more traumatic than you expect!
eta: corrections from @thumper1
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