Suggestion / Chances

Chance Me / Match Me!
1

<p>I was wondering if people could throw out some suggestions for colleges.. for my stats, my sister is a soph at harvard undergrad, but obviously my low GPA puts me at a very low chance of admittance..</p>

<p>Stats:
Gender: Male
Ethnicity: URM Black
Location: Montana
GPA: 3.3 UW 3.18 W
SAT's: 800 USH, 780 WH, 770 Bio
Act: 34
APs: 13 Taken by jr year, almost 100% positive on what I recieved this year for scores.. anyway;
5's: World Hist, US Hist, Human Geography, Eng lang and comp
4's: Psychology, Environment Science, Biology, European History, U.S. Government, Micro Economics
3's: Comparative Government, Macro Economics
1-3: Stats</p>

<p>EC's:
Student Democrats, Secretary 3 years / webmaster soph-sr
Varsity debate: 4 years LD 4 Years Domestic Extemp 4 years Student Congress
Varsity Oral Interpretation: 3 years freshman - jr
Varsity Cross-Country: 2 Years freshman-soph
Founder of tutoring program for immigrant students and disadvantaged students. Jr-Sr Year
Founder of tolerance and diversity organization promoting acceptance for different races, religions, sexual orientations etc. jr-sr year</p>

<p>Intended Major: Women and Gender Sexuality Studies, African American Studies</p>

<p>Hooks: Founder of two organizations, one for tutoring first generation immigrants, other for tolerance and acceptance of different people
Also took 13 AP tests, 5 of them I self studied, AP National Scholar / State Scholar</p>

<p>I am applying for harvard SSP and I will update those stats to this in the future, but hopefully will get into it and get a few A's in some courses.</p>

<p>Obviously this is without recs / essays / etc.. but just a preliminary stats eval..</p>

<p>I was looking at Ivy League, but I don't think I can get in with such a low GPA.. Anyone have any suggestions of where to apply for my major?</p>

2

<p>How is your weighted GPA lower than unweighted?</p>

3

<p>wow- a black male from montana will get you into just about every top LAC in new england. the schools that jump out for me with those majors are vassar, connecticut college, wesleyan, amherst, bowdoin, dartmouth, tufts</p>

4

<p>Your excellend scores, urm status and your state make you an interesting candidate for top schools. As you have pointed out, your gpa could cause concern. Do you go to a very competitive high school? Is there an explanation for why your gpa doen not seem to reflect your talent? What will your counselor and teachers say about your performance in school?</p>

<p>I would certainly apply to any school you like, but there are many highly qualified urm applicants at ivies and top LACs. I see more and more each year as an alumni interviewer for a top LAC. Make certain to have some backups you really love.</p>

5

<p>oops that is a mistake on my grades, the UW and W need to be reversed, my problem in high school was that I had really poor attendance my soph-jr year due to a lot of illnesses, e.g. pneumonia. Additionally, I was completely unmotivated to some extent over those time periods due to being completely fatigued, which turned out to be an undiagnosed case of narcolepsy. My school weights AP classes as almost nothing, so while I have taken a lot, kids that take foods and PE classes are ranked way above me. Grade inflation is rampant at my school outside of AP classes. Yet in AP classes, my school deflates grades so that they are distributed like a bell curve. It is not that I have necessarily done bad in my AP's, but I always seemed to score like a 92% in my courses, and consequently missing an A by a percentage point.</p>

6

<p>If you can convince admissions offices that your less than stellar GPA was due to some problems not under your control, you will probably get into half the ivies. You have stellar SAT scores, good EC's, and an interesting choice of majors. If you can express why you want to go into women and African American studies, this will show something pretty unique. Even though these are graduate school rankings and US News isn't always that great. Here's a link for the Humanities rankings, scroll to the bottom to see top 3 rankings for some of your concentrations:
<a href="http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/phdhum/phdhumindex_brief.php%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/phdhum/phdhumindex_brief.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>