I’m not asking for a pity party, and I’m definitely not looking for any sympathy. I just want to know, should I give up on Stanford?
Right now I’m a rising junior. I have a weighted GPA (the AP’s in my school are weighted as honor classes) of 3.98, have never gotten any B’s on my report card since I was in elementary school, am on varsity track and XC (though that probably won’t matter), and am a leader of the animal advocates club in my school. But I will admit that my test scores aren’t so hot. I haven’t taken the SAT or ACT yet, but I have taken the SAT math level 2 and the AP world AP exam. On my level 2 exam I got a 750 the second try (the first time I took it I did nothing to prepare for it so…that was a mistake), and on my AP world AP exam, I received a 4. These certainly aren’t Stanford quality, and I know it.
My scheulde for this upcoming year is fairly rigorous. On top of managing my club with the other leaders and keeping up with track and XC, I’ll be taking chem, Spanish 4 (before AP Spanish), APuSH, AP Bio, AP Lang., AP Calc AB, and AP seminar. I’m hoping to raise my GPA above a 4.0 this year.
On top of that, I’ve been writing a story for quite some time and have a good 60 pages in. Of course it’s hardly a guarantee, but I would like to just try and send it in to a publisher after I’ve finished it and proofread it.
I’m already studying for the SAT, which I’ll be taking in October and January.
Please don’t tell me not to stress about college, because 1. I’m already stressed, but I think it’s for a fairly good reason. As a kid who is currently attending a private international school in Japan, even with a little over a 50% scholarship, this school is still draining money from my family. My mother and father have already told me that they refuse to send me to a low-level school, and I would like to go to the west coast, closer to my hometown. My mother has agreed on this and recommended me to do so. But if I don’t get into a good university? Well then I’ll be stuck in Japan and I’ve already got a plan on what to do if that happens, and trust me, that plan just means trouble and devastation for everyone. It is my dream to go to Stanford and has been for so long.
So please just tell me, straight and hard, should I give up or not?
(And yes, I studied ridiculously hard for AP world. I went over each chapter and did a map layout for it. So yeah, I spent a lot of time on that subject and still got a 4.)
The single most important and most difficult criteria for a school like Stanford is your grades and academic rigor. If you have never gotten a B then your UW GPA is very high. It is not healthy to pin your hopes on one college, particularly one with a 5 percent admit rate. I wouldn’t worry about 4s on AP tests. D applied to Stanford REA this year. My takeaway was that Stanford builds a class very carefully. Perfect test scores alone guarantee nothing. Admitted students actually have a fairly diverse range of scores. ECs seem to be very important particularly intensely academic or research oriented ECs. I would also reach out to Stanford admissions officer that covers Japan
Limiting yourself to Stanford, which has ~ 5% acceptance rate is an unnecessarily high-risk strategy. By any standard, there is more than one “good” school in California/on the west coast. So:
Do a lot more homework on west coast colleges, starting with the Claremont McKenna consortium. You know your parents best, so in whatever way works for them, lay out a range of options in which your test scores are in the top 25% of enrolled students and the middle 25-50%. Remind them that, for all of them, the acceptance rate is lower for international students than for US citizens.
Your 4 in APUSH is not going to be the reason you don't get into Stanford. AP scores are not required and not particularly paid attention to. Ask all the people who apply to competitive colleges with strings of '5's on 8, 10, 12 APs- but don't get in. Your 'profile' so far (SAT/ACT will obviously matter) looks a lot like most of the achiever-girls that my D's know/knew - who mostly didn't get in. For example, the valedictorian at a very academically competitive school, who had won a biggish national science prize (not Intel), is now at Princeton, after not making it off Stanford's wait list. The ones who got into Stanford were most often recruited for a sport, or had some other amazing part to them. This isn't to be discouraging, just trying to give you some perspective: there are just a lot of high achievers out there!
Focus on your unweighted GPA. The top colleges will strip out the weighting anyway.
I peeked at your other thread, and saw that you could be recruitable at DIII level. That might be worth pursuing. Among others, the Claremont Consortium are DIII (they have 2 teams between the 5 colleges).
Stanford is a reach for everyone, but you are a worthy candidate. Definitely apply if you want to go there, but you should choose some other match and safety schools too. AND you should also choose some other reach schools as you are a strong candidate. Good luck.