USC, UVa Chances

Chance Me / Match Me!
1

<p>I am almost certainly going to be a Quest Bridge applicant in the National College Match, and I am planning on ranking the following schools:</p>

<ol>
<li>MIT</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>Caltech</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>UPenn</li>
<li>USC</li>
<li>UVa</li>
</ol>

<p>Since I'm pretty sure I'm not going to get in at the first 6, I'm basically only interested in USC and UVa. If I don't get in at any of the above, I will either attend UT Austin (in-state) or Oklahoma University (NMF scholarship).</p>

<p>Texas public school, Grade 11</p>

<p>Class rank: 50/640 (will certainly increase with this semester's re-ranking, as my grades are always getting better)</p>

<p>UW GPA: 87.117/100</p>

<p>W GPA: 101.529/100 (Pre-AP courses receive +10 and AP courses receive +20 for ranking purposes)</p>

<p>I have always taken the most rigorous courses available to me, with the following at the Pre-AP and AP levels:</p>

<p>Pre-AP (similar to honors, for those whose schools don't have this)
Geometry, Biology, World Geography, English 1/2, Spanish 2/3, Algebra 2, Chemistry, and Pre Calculus</p>

<p>AP
World History, Statistics, Biology, US History, Spanish 4, Physics B, English 3</p>

<p>My senior schedule will contain 6 APs and an off period.</p>

<p>Intended major: some sort of engineering, most likely</p>

<p>PSAT: 222 : 77 CR, 64 M, 80 W</p>

<p>SAT:
2240 Jan 2013 : 790 CR, 770 M, 680 W
2310 May 2013 : 770 CR, 740 M, 800 W
2360 Super scored</p>

<p>SAT Subject Tests: I have not taken any subject tests yet, I will be taking Math 2, Physics and Chemistry in October. I am expecting 750-800 on all 3.</p>

<p>Extra-Curriculars:</p>

<p>These are quite sparse for me, my main EC has been Lincoln-Douglas debate (10/11, will continue 12), and I haven't advanced to any level beyond district and invitational tournaments. I volunteered for 10 hours at a tournament that my school hosted.</p>

<p>I have also been nominally involved with my school's robotics team, but this is really nothing to speak of.</p>

<p>Parchment indicates that I have an 81% chance at USC and 36% at UVa, are these close to accurate? Thank you to all respondents!</p>

2

<p>Your SAT is amazing, but your GPA and ECs are kinda low for both schools. I’d say low reach for UVa and high match/low reach at USC. join more clubs and do volunteering and I’d say you’d easily be able to get into USC</p>

3

<p>Thank you. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to volunteer a lot, I really need to get a job soon, my family is quite financially strained on top of our already low income. I hope the universities will see a job as an appropriate dedication of time and an indicator of some virtuous traits.</p>

4

<p>My goodness your SAT is amazing, I’d say that since you’re OOS UVA is a low reach but I would say that if you volunteer more, and raise your GPA slightly USC should be a match.</p>

5

<p>Unfortunately, as I am in finals week of my junior year, my GPA is written in stone as far as college admissions are concerned. This summer will certainly be a productive one, but I’ll most likely be doing things other than volunteering.</p>

<p>One thing I’ve been wanting to do for a while is to develop an app for the App Store, and I plan to do that this summer. I will try to use that project to learn about website and Facebook integration, etc.</p>

<p>Thank you for your input, USC is really the one I’m looking to go to at the moment, but I’m constantly comparing the two because they are so close in my mind.</p>

6

<p>Bump, I would really appreciate more opinions.</p>

7

<p>Bring up my post.</p>

8

<p>UVa should be close to a sure thing and I wouldn’t totally rule out UPenn. Your application will get a closer review if it comes via Questbridge and you will likely be granted a bit of latitude that more well-to-do students won’t get. Your SATs are top-notch and your class rank is well within the top 10% plus holding a real job is a prized EC.</p>

<p>Most Questbridge applicants get accepted during the RD round, and you’re not limited to 8 schools. The initial round is most often used to cherry-pick the hardest-to-find URMs, first gen college, and those whose EFC=0 and not a penny more. If you look at the averages, the RD placements actually have higher stats, the early round applicants have more movning hard-luck stories.</p>

<p>I personally would limit myself to the first 6 in the opening round and add USC and UVa in the RD round, along with Rice, Williams, Amherst and perhaps a couple of others. You’d have an edge with Rice as a Texan and an edge with the LACs by being male, which is an underrepresented applicant group.</p>

<p>My son applied via Questbridge and only put down MIT and Yale during the initial round (deferred and then rejected). In RD, he was accepted to Brown, Williams (early write), Amherst (early write) and Northwestern.</p>

9

<p>First, I really appreciate your post. It is, I think, what a chance response should look like.</p>

<p>I am a white, male, first generation college student, and my EFC will equal 0.</p>

<p>For a long time, I was considering applying to Bowdoin (by far my top choice), Middlebury, Pomona, Carleton, and several other LACs, but at the time this rested on the prospect of going to medical school. One day, while watching some videos from Stanford Business, I decided med school was settling for less.</p>

<p>I decided I wanted to do what my personal hero, Elon Musk, does, which is essentially build companies that change the world in ways he thinks it should be changed. I hope this doesn’t seem too ridiculous.</p>

<p>While I want to “be an engineer” in a general sense, I certainly don’t have to nominally hold an engineering degree, but I do need the skill set. In fact, I need a skill set beyond that of an engineer, because the products I want to make will be extremely hard to design, and over the course of my career, I plan to enter completely different industries.</p>

<p>Elon Musk does not have an engineering degree, either, and his example makes me further open to the idea of alternatives to engineering. He has a degree in physics and another in economics from UPenn SAS and Wharton, respectively. </p>

<p>So, my quandary is this: will the time spent studying the liberal arts in college better replace the further technical preparation of an engineering degree? Of course, I will most likely major in either physics or computer science (or both), so I will receive a large amount of scientific instruction, but I can’t help but wonder if the rest of the time couldn’t be better spent.</p>

<p>It is hard to make the correct conclusion when this particular question receives such polarized answers, and the only resources one has are essentially hearsay from random forum users and official descriptions from the schools. The only sources that provide real information are those who have already graduated from college, but again, the responses are mere assertions, polarized into those that didn’t go to an LAC and think they’re a waste of money (el irony) and those that went and loved it, and think that their degree helps them in unforeseen ways.</p>

<p>The waters are further muddled when I consider that I’m almost certainly going to grad school for engineering, maybe even B-school, which seems to eliminate all perceived risk associated with an LAC for my situation.</p>

<p>I suppose it really is as Steve Jobs says, you can never connect the dots looking forwards. </p>

<p>I appreciate any help and insight you or any other may offer.</p>

<p>Also, I’m not going to Rice. I need to get out of the South, UT and OU are absolute worst case scenario. I do think I’ll take your advice on holding off for USC and UVa to see how the LACs and non-QB schools go, as I might apply to Cornell and some others.</p>

10

<p>

</p>

<p>It sounds like Brown would be a great fit for your needs. Brown is one of only a handful of schools with an open curriculum – there are no required classes outside those needed for your major. This gives you the flexibility to go with depth (multiple majors without distraction) or breadth or both if you wish to push yourself and take an extra class each semester. The best thing is that you don’t have to decide right away: you can go in with a plan, take the basic required courses and switch gears later if you like.</p>

<p>My son is pursuing a combination pre-packaged CS/applied math degree (BS) and has plans to add a physics degree to that (BA). Brown does not have minors, but in STEM fields you can pursue a Bachelor of Science degree or a Bachelor of Arts, which has lessor requirements. You only get one degree (unless you opt for a 5th year), but both will appear on your diploma (and on your resume).</p>

<p>For what you want to pursue, Brown has one of the best and most-loved professors in the entire country (according to Princeton Review), Barrett Hazeltine, who teaches a couple of business entrepreneurship classes within the engineering department.</p>

<p>Here’s an article about Hazeltine and you may find this excerpt particularly relevant:

</p>

<p>[Brown</a> Alumni Magazine - Hazeltine’s Way](<a href=“Hazeltine's Way | Brown Alumni Magazine”>Hazeltine's Way | Brown Alumni Magazine)</p>

<p>Also, Brown seems to have a fondness for Questbridge applicants. It waived the supplemental essay requirement for those applying through QB. And after my son was accepted, they paid to fly him out to ADOCH to see the school for himself before he made a final decision. And, yes, he began to fall in love with the school during the first 15 minutes when they opened their presentation with a series of movie and TV film clips which all made fun of Brown. This is the only school I have ever heard of doing this with accepted but yet-to-committ students, and I suspect it’s not just Brown’s quirky humor but a strategy to weed out the prestige hounds while keeping the independent thinkers.</p>

11

<p>Thank you, you have been so helpful.</p>

<p>As it stands now, I think I will do the following:</p>

<ol>
<li>Apply to those first 6 in the NCM</li>
<li>Apply to Brown, Williams, Amherst, Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Pomona, Vanderbilt, Yale, USC and UVa in RD using Questbridge</li>
<li>Apply to Cornell, UT Austin, and probably OU or another financial safety.</li>
</ol>

<p>If I’m not rejected everywhere but those safeties, I’ll try to visit where I get in and make a choice based on my options at that time.</p>

<p>Sounds like a planonis.</p>

12

<p>And what is it with all these people who, despite low grades and mediocre extracurriculars, somehow manage to pull off this artificially high test score? Where’s the correspondence? What does that say about the accuracy of all these scantron bubble exams?</p>

<p>You my friend have a good chance at USC and UVA.</p>

13

<p>@legooo The SAT is really easy. The only reason I got 680 W the first time was because my essay received a 6 (I only missed 1 MC question), which I believe was an unfair score. You can read about that in my post history, I won’t go into it here.</p>

<p>I did not do any significant studying for the SAT. Total prep time for the test likely amounted to about 2 hours, and much of that was required by the school, because I was placed in a study hall dedicated to the PSAT because of my score as a sophomore. We really didn’t do very much prep at all.</p>

<p>As for my low grades, I promise you that I’m far more intelligent than my GPA suggests. I don’t like to make excuses, but I will say that I had ample cause to be distracted from school during my freshman year, and I had no intention of attending any college at that time.</p>

<p>During that year, I separated from my religious organization and lost most of my closest relationships, as well as a great deal of my mother’s emotional support (she was the only parent in our household at the time). I’ve been spending roughly the last 2 years trying to both raise my GPA and discontinue the habits that had developed during my first year.</p>

<p>This also affected my ECs because I wanted nothing to do with people for a while. Again, I don’t wish to excuse, only explain.</p>

<p>Things are a lot better for me now, and I made some excellent friendships sophomore year. I am a lot happier as a person, and feel consistent personal growth, largely because I now surround myself with individuals who push themselves to succeed (my BEST friend is rank 1 in our class) and I think that competition rubs off on me.</p>

<p>My experiences have lead me to fully embrace the idea that struggle breeds success, and while I don’t like a lot of the consequences, I don’t know that I’d have it any other way if it meant losing the crucial lessons. Especially since I’m going to be just fine without going to MIT.</p>

<p>I sincerely thank you for your input.</p>