<p>Mrinal - good luck! Is the wait time for the appointment long or were you able to manage an appointment date within a week?</p>
<p>SEVIS fee is different from the application fee - so should both be paid before making the apptmt?</p>
<p>^^It is on 14th of this month. I don’t know all that, but I did pay ~9000 Rupees for the Visa process. ;)</p>
<p>idream, no, i didn’t.
i didnt get enough financial aid. i asked them to reconsider, but they didnt do anything about it. its was getting pretty expensive for me, so i dropped the plan :|</p>
<p>mrinal: i wont be taking ACTs, thats for sure! :
btw, should i take SAT1 in october and SAT2 in november? or vice-versa?
someone else please help/suggest as well? thanks.</p>
<p>Would it be a welcome change to take the SAT Subject Tests in October? Would you like to get over with the Reasoning Test once and for all in October?</p>
<p>J’ai d</p>
<p>When are the wait list decisions out, Tizil?</p>
<p>idream: Not yet; still waiting. Though I am done with High School Maths forever now. Took my BC Calc exam this morning. It was like trying to find the best Taylor approximation to a curve. Tiresome yet better than Maclaurin. English Lit. tomorrow.</p>
<p>Hey all.
So i was going through some article, and it said that if you are in the top 1-5% of the high school, you have greater chance, regardless of much variation in your scores when compared to a top15-20% kid?!
Comment?</p>
<p>rew, even though I am have not yet gone through the process myself, but I think that the above statement has some truth. On the numerous decision threads, the only trend I have noticed is that the ivy/elite college acceptees tend to be in top 10% of their class. Being Valedictorian helps a lot, more so at Cornell, so have I been told by the current students.
Hope this helped. :)</p>
<p>Well rew, it does sound logical, doesn’t it? Class rank is one of those objective things that let adcoms compare you with other applicants of your school in the same context. The subjective parts of your app, especially EC’s, aren’t that easy to evaluate. How can you compare a passion in singing to, say, athletic achievements? It becomes a lot more complicated after that as many other factors come into play.</p>
<p>
Exactly my unposted thoughts.</p>
<p>^^
I don’t understand how rank could be considered important for international students, especially ones from India where we have a very few number applying for undergrad schools in the US.
This is a matter that has been perplexing me for sometime too (I am an American currently studying in India and planning to apply to Columbia and NYU, among others), as most schools nowadays aren’t disclosing information related to rank. I myself got an 88.4 in my 10th ICSE exam, and have no idea what my rank is.
It seems to me that the scores and grades of international applicants who attended schools with a small amount of applicants, would be taken in relation with each other. Rank, especially in India can really be subjective too if you account for the various boards and the quality of schools. A kid, for example, could apply to Harvard on the basis that he was first in his school. Now if that school was affiliated with the state-board, had a small student body and a was situated in semi-urban area, would he really be competing with a child, in the top 5 percentile, from a large international or ICSE school located in Mumbai or Delhi?</p>
<p>^ That’s what your school profile is required for. It gives the admission officers background information on one’s school so they know how to evaluate the applicant in that context. Class rank(or decile) helps them co-relate your marks/grades with your actual standing in your class. Lets take your own example. You got an 88.4 in your 10th board. If thats the only information available to admission officers it becomes difficult for them to term your percentage as good, extremely good, or average. But if your class rank is available to them and you fall under the top 1-5% category of the students in your school, they know that your score is extremely good. Of course, applicants from India are evaluated in relation to each other to some extent. But US adcoms, well familiar with applications from India, keep in mind the surroundings of all applicants and the opportunities available to them.</p>
<p>Ah, ohk.
A question again-
Since our school doesnt have a Guidance counselor, i would be choosing a teacher, who knows me well, as the GC.
Recently, the no of students of who’ll be applying to States have drastically gone up- from 3 to an average of 15ish this year itself. No one was interested in it till last year (from my batch, when i was in 11th) and now almost every 4th person is taking his/her SAT.
Coming back to my ques on the Guidance Counselor (GC).
Since there isnt any fixed GC, the applicants will be requesting other teachers to act as their GC. Wont the colleges be all suspicious to see do many GCs from a single school? They can also reject the applicant on this basis, cant they?!
What to do about this case?
(and my principal says that she doesnt intent to be the GC for the applicants, so says the vice princi of the school!)</p>
<p>If i were you, I would find out directly from the Admission’s Office of the college I’m planning to apply to, rather than blindly trust somebody on CC.</p>
<p>What AdityaP said. Also, I think it has to be your principal if you don’t have a counsellor. But really, get in touch with the admission’s office.</p>
<p>Well, I addressed the same problem to Brown’s Admission office. They said that if a school does not have a GC, they should get their principal to act as one. If the principal refuses( very rare, I think) you should get a teacher who knows you well enough to act as the GC.
I don’t see any problem with the teacher serving as your GC, though it wouldn’t hurt to attach a note with the application that your school doesn’t have an official GC. :)</p>
<p>hello fellow indians, please help me out on this topic <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-life/1338726-help-college-reviews-website-links.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-life/1338726-help-college-reviews-website-links.html</a></p>
<p>For those on wait lists - apparently, MIT, Stanford, UChicago are not looking at waitlists. They had enough yield. Don’t know about others. Good luck to those still waiting. You will do well no matter where you end up, that’s for sure.
Tizil - how was AP cal BC and AP Eng? Interestingly all the US folks found AP chem hard. It really depends on the teachers here and how much they prepare them. About labs, they do labs during class and are graded for the class scores. But most labs are done with partners not solo lab exams like India.</p>
<p>F16Parent, add Brown (official confirmation to interviewers) to that list. Also, UChicago offered wait list admissions to students on the Z-List, starting Fall 2013.</p>
<p>Also, I found Calc BC a bit hard and some of the questions quite challenging. English Lit’s MCQs seemed really easy, maybe because my teacher gave me challenging ones throughout the year. I was well prepared for the essays and I think I did quite well but nothing had prepared me for writing three essays in two hours and managing my time well.</p>
<p>AP Chemistry was a breeze for me 
This just goes on to show the oft-known yet least acknowledged fact that the perceived level of difficulty is directly proportional to the time spent in preparation.</p>
<p>Labs, well, my IB labs were done in groups of two, because my teacher deemed that there were too many kids in the class (however, when you compare that to 45 kids in one section, it seems like nothing 
). Since my AP class had only three kids including me, we did individual labs.</p>
<p>^thanks. My D is taking BC next year (as a Junior) so we will see. She is due to take couple of APs next week (bio/history). But both teachers were excellent so she is prepared well.</p>