Unique Case

Chance Me / Match Me!
1

<p>When I was nine years old, my mother was arrested for dealing marijuana, and when I was ten, my father and stepmother were arrested for a meth lab. As a result of living with my rather capricious mother, I've moved around seventeen times and had around twelve school changes since elementary school. When I was fifteen, my mother got into a motorcycle wreck
and now I live with my father, visiting her on the weekends. She has seizures 90% of my visits, forgets things constantly, and still suffers from depression and the temptation of drugs.</p>

<p>Income bracket: < $50,000 annually
GPA: 4 (UW), 4.6 (W)
White Male
ACT: 35 composite; 36 math & 36 science
Tied for rank 1 out of a class of around 350.
EC's: 100 hrs of community service: tutoring and mission trip with church, member of my church's youth group for 5 years, member of our academic decathlon team that qualified for nationals, part of science knowledge bowl team - 2nd place in state (1st was the only to go to nationals), a bunch of math competitions, programming addons for world of warcraft (have 50,000 downloads in past 3 months), program 3-D graphers for calculators (TI-83/84), robotics, Latin (language) club, engineering & medicine programs - I work and learn from engineers and medical doctors, member of NHS</p>

<p>Plenty of AP classes, bioscience and medicine programs that offer college credit (at schools that accept it), Calc III</p>

<p>These are my credentials up to date; I'm a junior that has yet to take SAT or Subject tests, but I expect to do well enough on them.</p>

<p>I'd like to know what you guys think my chances are for (in order of interest):
MIT
UPenn
Cornell U.
Washington University in St. Louis
Vanderbilt
Rice</p>

2

<p>You can get into all of those schools. Dealing with those intense personal hardships and still being able to succeed is fantastic and shows a lot of perserverence</p>

<p>Make sure you don’t sound too whiny during your essays (as mean as that sounds) but yea.</p>

<p>MIT- High match (but id say you are in)
UPenn- High match
Cornell- Match
WashU- In
Vanderbilt-In
Rice- Match</p>

<p>Very impressive and I’m sure adcoms will be very impressed.</p>

3

<p>Mate, first before chancing you I’d like to give you a congratulations and tip my hat off to you (If I had one). Going through all those hardships and still succeeding shows you are a an amazing person. You deserve to go to all these top schools. Now that being said, I’d say you already have a decent chance if you manage to talk about these hardships in some form (essays for example). But as the previous poster said, don’t make it too whiny. Your aim is to tell the reader what you learned from all of these, to endeavor to show your sterling character. Yet, to further improve your chances I’d say your EC’s are normal. You need some sort of extra “hook” (not sure if that’s the right word) to show how you’re different from the other 1000 programming, robotic totting asian applicants (How I love stereotypes, jk). Other than that I’d say you have a great chance.</p>

4

<p>Thanks for the opinion! The suggestions are welcomed and appreciated.</p>

5

<p>Will it ruin me that I had an off-day when I took the PSAT? I only got a ~200 index score which is not even good enough for commended status.</p>