I am a high school sophomore enrolled at a national blue ribbon highschool. Dual enrollment at our local community college is built into the school and there are no AP’s. I am a little worried about what that will do to my chances of being admitted to a top school. I would like to attend MIT.
I have straight A’s. Freshman year I took math 12 (college algebra), and math 8 (trig) through the college. I also took high school biology, English, frosch tech (1 semester course), world history, AVID 9, science seminar (1 semester), and math seminar (1 semester).
Note: all my highschool grades were, and still are, 98% and above if that matters to you, though of course colleges won’t see that. Also, my school does not provide rankings.
This semester I am taking:
College: German I (2 years of high school German in one semester), and Calculus
High school: Chemistry, Ecology, English 2, AVID 10, Leadership, Math Seminar
Next semester I have signed up for:
College: Calculus II, German II (high school third year of German), and drawing I
High school: creative writing, AVID 10, chemistry, advisory period (ignore-- my school is weird) and English.
I also took two summer classes: a health requirement and statistics. According to my current 4-year-plan, by the end of highschool I will have an AA in natural science and an AA in mathematics. I will have completed math through linear algebra and differential equations at the college, plus the nature of mathematics and statistics. I will have taken the equivalent of 3 years of high school german, and hopefully a fourth of independent study. I have not completely maximized my course load (it is acknowledged at my school that to do so is suicide and stupidity-- no hard work-- but it still makes me nervous). However, besides requirements and high school electives I will have taken through the college both trig and calf based physics, astronomy, and a CS course (plus the aforementioned math). On the matter of extracurriculars, I am starting the school newspaper-- we just released our first edition-- and I am on dance committee. I have done about 30 hours so far of identifying benthic macro invertebrates at a local river-science organization. I am enrolled in a music compostion class (the only one of its kind, and quite selective for my small town) and I play piano. For the piano, I play at many local concerts, usually for charity. For the composition, twice a year my pieces are played by professional musicians in a concert locally. I did ski team freshman year, but I cannot afford it again this year, so my primary sport is kung fu, which I have been doing for 9 years. I am a black sash, I help teach classes sometimes, and I have international medals from a kung fu tournament in Baltimore that the president sends a rep to each year. This summer I will be doing an internship with a physicist named Garett Lisi at his research institute in Hawaii-- he developed e8 theory (certainly not accepted, but impressive nonetheless as an alternative to string theory which he continues to develop). I am teaching myself linear algebra on the side before I take the actual class senior year to prepare for this. I also illustrated my mothers novel, which will be published later this year, and I am publishing my own illustrated children’s book. This summer and onwards I plan to start working at the college tutor center (being paid to help cc students with their classes) because I love explaining things to people and I do a lot of it anyways…
I know this is certainly not your standard “chance me” but I want outside opinions on the classes I am taking. Do I need more extra curriculars? Do I need to compensate somehow for the lack of AP’s? I want to know if, on the relative path I am now, I will be qualified enough for MIT that the rest is up to my essays and letters of recommendation.
I really want to attend this school. Not for the prestige or because it’s the first name that pops up in the rankings, but because the more research I do, the more sure I am that I want to go there. I want to go into astrophysics if you’re wondering, but I don’t want to go somewhere like Caltech that has no balance because I will continue to pursue music and art for the rest of my life, even though I will not pursue a career in them.
Thanks!