The Ever-Popular "What Are My Chances?"

Hello everyone,

So, I’m curious as to what my chances are. Please keep in mind some details are missing, but I would love to just have a general idea going forward.

I’m currently a junior in the IB program. For my freshman and sophomore years, I was in an arts program at my school for creative writing but switched into IB because of a change in interest. The arts program kept me after school for 2 hours everyday, which lead to a lot of extracurricular performances as you will see below.

I am taking the SAT two times in the coming semester, as well as the ACT. I am aiming for a 1480 for the first time around and a 34. I will take the SAT my senior year if my scores are not good enough (want a 1540). Plan to take two SAT Subject Tests, possibly Chem, French, and/ or English.


CLASSES:

-Freshman

H French 3, H Biology, H Geometry, H US History, H English 9, Standard and H Chorus (1 semester of each), my two creative writing classes that took up two slots in my schedule, all of my after school classes

Received all A’s apart from Geometry (B) and two B’s in my after school classes (really dumb on my part, hopefully will taken into consideration lightly)

-Sophomore

H French 4, H Chemistry, H Algebra 2, AP Government (4), H English 10, AP Psychology (5), my two creative writing classes, all of my after school classes

Received all A’s except for last quarter of H Chem (B)

-Junior (1 semester in)

IB French, IB Chemistry, IB Physics, H Pre-Calc, IB History, IB English

Received all A’s except Chem and Physics (B’s)

-For the future semester and my senior year:

IB French, IB Physics, AP Bio, IB Math SL, IB History, IB English, IB TOK, hopefully take chorus again

My school is public, not super great, but my classes will be marked as highly/most challenging.
Not sure what my gpa is to date, but my quarterly gpa was a 4.5.
At the end of sophomore year I think it was:
Weighted: 4.0
Unweighted: 3.8
I am sure it is MUCH higher now as a result of all of my IB classes.
I am in the top ten percent of my class out of upwards of 600 kids, though now I’m sure it has gone up as well.
I also intended to get all A’s from here on out.


EXTRACURRICULARS:

-Lots of performances as apart of arts program, have all of the playbills for them (9 and 10)
-Self-published two books (9 and 10)
-French NHS (10-12)
-NHS (10-12)
-Founded my school’s Writing Club, VP two years (10-11) P one (12)
-JV Cross Country (11-12) maybe varsity 12
-Volunteer at the library (10-11) 50+ hours
-Founded my school’s running club, where we run a 5k every month with practices everyday (like a sports team), P (11-12)

FUTURE EC:
-Found my school’s chapter of the Science NHS, P
-Start a blog
-Work a part-time job
-Possibly start taking some kind of horse-back lessons
-I have this really cool idea for starting a BIG fundraising activity locally. Hopefully it will be successful.
-Everything I have to do for CAS


COLLEGES

In college, I think I would like to study astronomy or architecture.

Dartmouth College (NH)
Yale University (CT)
Washington and Lee University (VA)
I’m not really sure right now but please suggest some schools I would be a good match for.

Without knowing your actual SAT or ACT score, or current weighted GPA, it’ll be harder to chance you, but I’ll indulge you and assume that you’ll achieve the level of future performance you say you will.

Dartmouth: Reach to low reach. 20 to 30%.
Yale: High reach. 10%.
Washington and Lee: Low match. 60%.

I’d suggest adding a couple more matches, and definitely some safeties. Yale in particular is a reach for everyone, no matter how good they are. There’s just so many qualified applicants like yourself, that it’s almost impossible for your chances to ever climb above 15%.