Weird Application Chance Me!

Chance Me / Match Me!
1

Hi everyone

After a lot of traction on my other threads, I have decided to dedicate a full thread to give more context and get more insight on where I can end up.

Stats: 4.0 - straight As in APs - 33 ACT - 2 SAT IIs in Sept (math 1 and lit)
**Tuition: **Full pay
**Country: **Canada (white)
**School: **Online, private, accredited
Classes: no APs or honors until junior year. In total, it will be 8 APs and 2 Honors over the course of two years (including summer).

I live in a shared cottage up north (really remote).

Story:

I’ll try to keep it brief here. I started high school a long ways back around 2015. I did homeschooling with my mom and my brother, but it did not work out well. I only did around 20 minutes of school a day, I didn’t have any discipline or any goals. And, after 2 years, I only finished four or five pass/fail courses. I had a choice to make: drop out and live off of my wealthy family who could provide me with everything I need to live a comfortable life, or try again with online school. I chose online school despite the fact I would be two or three years behind throughout my life and would have to face the strong chance that I would fail again. Somehow, it worked out. Once I had full control and full responsibility, I thrived. In grade 10, I managed to maintain a 4.0 GPA and stay on top of my coursework despite constant travel in less-than-optimal locations. Another choice arose: do around an hour of work a day and just enjoy life and go to the local college (or just graduate from high school and stop there), or pile on the work and dedicate more and more time to school. I decided the latter. I took some of the hardest courses possible and did summer classes. I studied really hard for the ACT, took it once and didn’t like my score (27) so I studied more and more and retook it and got a 33. I continue to work through the process alone and have been trying to decipher this college admissions process that I was never exposed to.

The past few years I have totally utilized my online studies. I live at a small shared (among four families) cottage in northern Canada with my family.

**Extracurriculars: **

-Putting in (and taking out) four docks and boatlifts in 50-degree water every year for my elderly neighbors (not because we were told or asked, but because we’ve been doing it since I was 5)
-Every time we leave our lake, we have to do a huge cleanup. Normally, it’s every two weeks or so that we do a top to bottom clean! (we can’t leave it dirty because it’s shared)
-Every time someone comes up to the lake, I go out and help unload their car (full of food, normally).
-Teaching people to surf when they come up for the first time
-I run a small business in this little village. I chop down small trees for $25, take them back home, chop them into kindling, and sell them outside for $5. My cousins/brother help out quite a bit.
-I help my brother with a small fish deboning service in the village. People drop off fish and he debones them for a small cost.
-Tarping boats during storms
-Volunteering in the village for small things

You kind of get the gist. There’s a lot of work to go around at a small shared cabin. Every trip we do to-and-from the lake requires a lot of individual effort, but it’s always worth it in the end.

It’s might be worth noting that one of my family members is deaf, one is on the spectrum, and another (baby) has some issues as well. I think this can speak to my community and how I was conditioned into the person I am today, although I would never want to ‘use’ them in my application.

Recommendations: I am really inquisitive, so I share a lot of deep discussions with some of my teachers; I think they can speak to that and my kindness, but I’m not too sure how that compares(?). Unfortunately, some of these teachers left my school (which happens often, because it’s just an online school that normally people don’t hold full-time positions with). My counselor should be able to give me a good recommendation, as I am getting closer and closer with her as time goes on.

Schools:
-Stanford- Product Design
-Brown (early decision because I love everything about Brown and it’d be 100% worth it for the money)- Behavioral Decision Sciences
-Dartmouth (rural like where I live now)
-Northwestern- Manufacturing and Design Engineering

-Babson- Tech, Entrepreneurship, and Design
-Vanderbilt (CS or Econ)
-Northeasternx2- I love so many of their programs, can’t decide yet but I’ll apply to at least two.
-USC Marshall- Business Admin (love their electives and freedom)
-U Washingtonx2- Business Admin and/or Industrial Design
-Waterloo- Business Admin + CS or Global Business and Design Arts

-Chapman- Behavioral and Computational Economics
-ASU- Product Design
-Western Washington U- Industrial Design

**I have four Canadian schools also, including really high chance safeties. Didn’t include because they are not relevant.

I will probably be starting my apps this summer, so I have the time (and money) to apply to a lot of these schools. The chances of me going to a school like ASU or Chapman are small because of the cost to academic level ratio, but I thought I would include them to give me some options moving forward.

Thank you all!!

2

In case anyone is confused with my six year high school schedule:

Grade 9 (3 years to complete; homeschooled)
P/F Social Studies, English, Math, Science, and Health

Grade 10 (started at the new, online school; near 4.0 GPA)-
World History, World Literature, Geometry, Biology, Spanish (dropped because I thought ‘I don’t need Spanish, this was a mistake’), 4 electives

Grade 11 (same online school, realized I had potential; straight As in everything)-
AP Psych, AP English Lang and Comp, Honors Alg2, Chemistry, AP CSP, French (dropped because ASL was released and I wanted to learn that because I have a deaf aunt whom I am close to. Didn’t make sense to take French 1 and then ASL 1 and 2).

Summer School (same online school; this coming summer)-
ASL 1, Honors PreCalc

Grade 12 -
AP Economics (both), AP English Lit and Comp, AP Calc BC, Honors Physics, Arts, ASL 2, AP Computer Science A

3

How are you reporting the 3 years it took you to complete 9th grade? I don’t know how colleges calculate pass/fail grades or if having 3 years of them will lower the 4.0 GPA you have for the last 3 years.

4

“…because of the cost to academic level ratio”

This was exactly what I was wondering about also. The other issue that concerned me is that at least in my experience being a Canadian graduating from a highly ranked US university is not necessarily the easiest way to find job opportunities. US companies prefer to hire people who have the legal right to work in the US. Canadian companies seem to want to hire graduates from the many excellent Canadian universities.

The first four on your list look like reaches to me. I would expect that your chances at Waterloo would be very good. I do wonder why you would do Western Washington U, or even Northeastern relative to some of the schools in Canada.

Have you looked at some of the smaller universities in Canada such as UNBC or some of the smaller schools in eastern Canada?

5

@austinmshauri I honestly don’t know.

I am hoping that colleges can see how I’m really on an upward trend, but I totally understand how this could be seen as a really big negative. I genuinely don’t know how to report it (yet).

@DadTwoGirls

I’ll definitely look into more Canadian schools, thank you for the help. So far, I have Simon Fraser, UBCO, Waterloo, (local U), UBC, and McGill.

To be honest with you, I just love the states. I travel quite a lot and I would much prefer to live in a place like Massachusetts, Washington, CA, Colorado, etc. than in Canada. Don’t get me wrong, I love certain places in Canada, but the options aren’t as plentiful as in the states.

We have the money, given that no other family members of mine are going to college. My final list is probably going to look something like this:

3 Dreams, 3 reaches, 1 match in US, 2 matches in Canada, 2-3 Safeties in Canada.

Also, I had troubles finding schools in Canada with programs that I would like. I’ll likely end up at SFU or Waterloo, but I would really like to apply to some American schools.

Thank you for the information! I really didn’t consider the fact of getting a job after graduation and the challenges that might come with being international.

6

One other thing, on your application things like cleaning the lake and unloading people’s cars aren’t counted as extracurriculars, they’re community service. Your only classic EC seems to be the kindling business, and that could also be categorized as work experience. Don’t get me wrong, all the work you do for your community will definetly help your app and give the admission readers insight into your circumstances, they’re just not classified as ECs. I do suggest writing thoroughly about them in your essays.

7

I think the time you can spend in the US after graduation will be limited. Make sure you understand the rules before your family commits to spending tens of thousands of dollars here.

8

@daunt18
Oh? Thanks for the help. Is there another layer to this? I’m trying to figure out if this means “you actually don’t have any ECs, so that is a problem” or “technically speaking, these are not ECs but will serve the same purpose as if they were.”

@austinmshauri Will do. I might consider doing grad school in the states instead of undergrad. I want to focus on Entrepreneurship, so I was thinking of getting that knowledge in the US and coming back and starting a business here. I will think more about this with my family, regardless-- thanks.

I guess this raises some problems, mainly making friends and then leaving them forever :neutral:

9

It does mean the former. You don’t have the classic ECs that admissions offices see the most of (ie. academic bowl, athletic team, speech and debate) that come with going to a traditional high school. Again though, if you explain your circumstances and your determination to self-study as you did, along with doing all the work for your community that you managed to balance, it shouldn’t be a problem.

10

If you were in the US, ASU and WWU would be safeties. I’m not sure how being int’l would complicate that, but I’d assume you should still be able to easily get in.
UW is probably possible but not guaranteed. I’d guess it would be a target.
Brown/Stanford/Dartmouth/Northwestern definitely all reaches. It doesn’t hurt to apply, but it would not be easy to get in. Brown is probably the one you have the best chance at. It’s just hard to guess because of your change in progression.
I don’t know any of the others well enough to have a guess.

11

I just hope that the “full pay” Canadian OP understands that US universities expect to be paid in US dollars.