Hi, I applied to some universities (HYPMS, Cornell and UPenn) this year but I was rejected in all(most of the results are not declared, but I’m sure I will be rejected everywhere). I am an international student with very strong EC’s. The main reason I was not accepted is definitely due to low SAT(1740) and bad essay, that’s because I am not a native English speaker. If I take a gap year I can publish some research papers, as well as prepare for ACT(SAT is difficult for me, I don’t know many words used in a paragraph) and also make some money for my education. If I maintain my ECs and increase my ACT score to something like 32+ will these universities consider my application again? Which universities should I consider reapplying in EA? I really wanted to apply for Caltech, but they don’t have EA for International Applicants who want need-based financial aid. It’s difficult for my parents to pay for ACT tutoring, so I am planning to self-study 3hrs every day to increase my score. I am sure that I can get 32+ and make some money for my education. But among these universities which university(I want to study Science or Engineering) is worth reapplying for EA and why? I am asking this in parents forum because I need advice from a parent because my parents don’t have any experience with US universities and are unable to guide me, in fact, I’m the first student in my school who is applying to US universities.
What about universities in your country of citizenship or residency? Or lower cost universities in any country?
Realistically, even well qualified applicants to those schools are unlikely to gain admission.
Even with a 32, as said above the probability of acceptance would be low. Learning how to write publishable research papers takes a while and the review and publishing process itself takes months or years. What are your choices for colleges this year?
@ucbalumnus I can get admission to any University in my country easily. It’s not like I want to take a gap year just to reapply to those universities, but I have lots of things I want to do in science which I can only do when I am not in school (we have to do lots of boring stuffs in school).
@CheddarcheeseMN Yeah, there are many qualifying candidates. I have published once before with the help of a professor in physics in my town so he can help me in that, but the publishing process would take some time though. But won’t be the universities be interested in the research I have done? I am interested to apply Caltech (I didn’t apply this year), Stanford (Reapply), Cornell(Some have been accepted in reapplication before) and Princeton (same as Cornell). Yale can be an option as well because they are new in engineering, but again the engineering community is very small and considered as weak, moreover they don’t keep any record of previous year applicants.
What? Yale’s school of Engineering and Applied Science was founded in 1852…I wouldn’t call that new, or weak.
js2020, I don’t think you have a full understanding of the American system. You seem to think that if you gain English fluency, you would be admitted to the schools of your choice. Most probably, you would still not be admitted. Virtually all of the applicants to these schools are highly qualified as well as being fluent in English, and less than one out of five is admitted. It’s less than one out of ten at the top schools. Publishing research is no guarantee of admission at top US schools. Plenty of students with published research are denied.
If you think that taking a gap year in order to do scientific research is worth your time, then you ought to do it, but I don’t even see how you could conduct your experiments, write them up, and get your paper accepted to a peer-reviewed journal in the nine months before the next admissions cycle.
Did you apply to any safties that you might have a chance at?
You should wait until you have all your decisions and after that plan the rest.
As an international myself, I know where you are coming from, but what I’ve learnt from the application process in the U.S. is that you should definitely apply to a wide range of schools, not only top 10-20, regardless of your scores.
Even if you were to improve your scores to the level where they would be competitive at the colleges you mention, you would still face daunting odds against admission. All these universities turn down thousands of highly-qualified applicants, from all over the world, every year. If you can find some attractive opportunities for a gap year, then pursue them, by all means. If you want to study here in the US, you need to widen your range of applications considerably. There are great science and engineering departments at almost every public university in the country. If you don’t need financial aid, you have an excellent chance of admission to many of them (NOT UC Berkeley, Michigan, UNC-Chapel Hill, however). Many brilliant kids, with precisely the test scores you hope to get in the future, are receiving disappointing news from their top choices, and will be attending the very universities that you seem uninterested in applying to. American colleges are prohibitively expensive, and shamefully unaffordable for most Americans. Most colleges overseas are less expensive. Only a handful of colleges - almost all of them brutally competitive for admission - will meet full financial need for international students. I don’t think you should pin your hopes on admission to any of them, but should either figure out which US universities your family might be able to afford. Some good public universities in the Midwest, West, and South (e.g. West Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Kansas, Iowa, Montana, et al) have relatively low out-of-state tuitions, and high acceptance rates. They all offer high-quality educations, especially in scientific fields.
My suggestion would be to consider the US for graduate school, rather than undergraduate. If you do succeed in undergraduate research that results in a real publication record, there will be graduate programs that will consider you, and you are more likely to receive a tuition waiver/stipend than to receive financial aid at a competitive undergraduate institution.
The suggestion of turning to graduate rather undergraduate programs doesn’t work if your country does not offer you the possibility of learning engineering at home (say, your home is in a war zone or a remote island). But if you can learn engineering at home, do well, and then apply for graduate school, the goal of an American education might be more achievable.
As others have said, gaining admission to the universities you have applied to is a low probability even even if you have much higher test scores than you report. Waiting a year won’t change that and publication of a research article will only have marginal impact for undergraduate admissions. You need to look at smaller private schools with engineering/science programs which give appreciable financial aid to international students but it will still be expensive at the end. If you want to still try for Fall 2015, there are probably such schools which have a rolling admissions policy at this time. You have not mentioned whether engineering is your preferred major but there are a lot of good engineering programs which are not at the schools you applied to.
Before deciding, read through everything here, https://www.educationusa.info/ and have a conversation with the counselors at the advising center closest to where you live https://www.educationusa.info/centers.php Those counselors will be able to tell you where students from your country have been admitted in recent years, and whether or not those students received any financial aid. They are the experts on your situation.
Like others say, what you really need to do is find colleges that would fit where you are academically, not try to make yourself fit the top 1% of US Schools. If you did not do well on SATs because English is not your first language, then you probably would not do well in school either.
Also try asking in the international students forum.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/international-students/
THey have more posts about aid for international students.