I ‘m a rising senior in a private high school in California. I have a 3.88 unweighted GPA and a 4.6 weighted GPA, 4.86 Weighted GPA on STEM courses. I have taken 8 AP classes (mostly 5 and 4 in all of them) with a large number of honors classes as well. MY ACT is 36 and SAT is 1530. Math II Subject test 800/800, Chem Sub Test 770, Bio Subject Test 770.
My ranking in school is the top 9%
Interested Major- Computer Science
extracurriculars include:
Speech and Debate (9th-12th grade), qualified for State and National level, Captain of Public Forum Speech and Debate team
Captain of Criminal Justice Team at my School (advocated for criminal justice reform at Sacramento and Washington DC)
Research Intern at UC
Paid Software Intern @ local Technology company (selected as a sole intern from my high school for this position)
President and working with an NGO since past 5 years
Won few Hackathon prices in 9th and 10th grade
Peer Tutoring (9th -10th-grade students in STEM subjects)
100+ hours of Christian community service
My list for colleges as follows:
MIT
Stanford
-UC Berkeley
-UCLA
-UC San Diego
-UC Santa Cruz
-UC Irvine
-CMU
-UI-Urbana Champagne
-Georgia Tech
-Cornell
-Purdue
-Harvard
-Cal Tech
-Harvey Mudd
-UT Austin
-UMichigan Ann Arbor
-UWashington
-UIUC (legacy- Alumni)
-Duke
-Harvard
-Northwestern
-Purdue
-UPenn (Comp Sci and Business Integrated Program).
-Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
-Cal Poly Pomona
-Princeton
-University of Washington -St.Louis
-NYU
What are my safety schools/reach/target/high reach schools? What are my chances in getting into above schools? Mainly CMU and UCB?
SLO uses 9-11th grades instead of the UC/Other CSU 10-11th GPA calculation. Once you have your SLO GPA input the rest of the information into the MCA calculator to get your MCA points which ranks you for CS against all the other CS majors applying.
You are a highly competitive applicant and you have a great chance at so many schools on your list. For the California schools, Cal Poly Pomona and UC Santa Cruz would be your safety schools.
UCB should be considered a Reach school but definitely within your grasp. EECS will much more difficult of an admit than CS in L&S.
Being OOS, UMich will be a reach for everyone. UMich doesn’t use weighted GPA, but considers GPA and rigor to be most important parts of the application per their CDS. Your unweighted GPA of 3.88 would be considered middle 50% (using available Class of 2022 stats), but that’s an overall average, which includes in-state applicants. The OOS average GPA of an accepted applicant would be higher.
High reaches: MIT, Stanford, CMU, Caltech, Harvard, Duke, HMU, NU, Cornell, Princeton
Reaches: Gtech, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UIUC UWash, WashU, UPenn, Michigan, UT Austin.
Low reach/high match: NYU, Purdue.
Match: UCSD.
Safeties are what @Gumbymom wrote
You need more target colleges and fewer reach colleges. I recommend that you remove WashU, Harvard, UT Austin, Duke, and Northwestern. Harvey Mudd is a very different type of place than the rest, so only apply if you like the idea of very small, very intense engineering LAC.
Note at UCB, if you are directly admitted into EECS, you are in CS. If you apply for CS through L&S and , you are admitted as pre-CS, and you have to petition into the major after getting through some weeder classes.
From UCB L&S undeclared, getting into the L&S CS major means earning a 3.3 GPA in the first three CS courses (61A, 61B, 70). About half of the students in these courses earn B+ or higher grades (but note that 61A and 61B course web pages say that they are not graded on a curve).
There are definitely some advantages to going thru L&S CS as opposed to EECS. Namely the fact that you have a lot more flexibility in double majoring. EECS also has a bit more regimented class requirements because of Engineering - required Physics and natural science classes along with not being able to bypass 1 R&C class that could be bypassed in L&S with a 5 in AP Literature.
Take out WUSTL/WashU (not the University of Washington-St. Louis as there is no such place). CompSci is OK, but not the focus of the school-son is doing a CompSci minor there. BME is more of the focus of the Engineering school there.
CompSci at CMU has acceptance rates on par with an Ivy/MIT/Stanford meaning a massive reach.
Purdue for any flavor of Engineering will be a reach.
CMU is much more achievable than HYPSM, but you definitely have a solid profile that can get you into ivies, etc. UCB is also pretty achievable even OOS I know people who have gotten in with your scores and much less ec’s. I can’t tell you anything else rlly just work on your essays and application a lot, and try to focus it around criminal justice/debate and compsci/science as your two hooks.
Thank you all for your comments in the past summer! That helped me build applications for the colleges Got accepted to UIUC - CS in EA Got differed by MIT and CalTech (relieved that I was not outright rejected)
Waiting for UCs as well as (CMU, Stanford applied in RD) and MIT/Caltech decisions (highly doubtful that I will get in though!). I have applied to EECS for UCB and keeping my fingers crossed !!
I also became a 2020 Coca-Cola scholar foundation semifinalist. But I received the news after I submitted applications to all the EA schools and UCs. Not sure how I will let UCB and other UCs know about my award. Caltech and MIT allow me to add this new information by using their update info forms, but I am not sure about UCs.
Got accepted to UIUC - CS in EA