My overall UW and W is bad bc of freshman year, so I’ll list from each year:
Freshman UW/W: 2.73/3.02
Sophomore UW/W: 3.85/4.02
Junior UW/W: 4.0/ 4.82
Class Rank: No class rank
ACT/SAT Scores:
1490 SAT; 690 reading-writing; 800 math
Coursework
*5-6 AP Courses
*10 honors
*School offers 22 AP’s
Awards
I’m a commended scholar for the PSAT (1440 qualifies)
Extracurriculars
Founder of an official non-profit:
I founded a non profit that helps people with special needs
Volunteers interact with participants with disabilities - we cumulatively involve 75 volunteers and 65 participants
Coding for my non-profit:
Worked on code to enhance services that we provide
CS intro classes:
Through my non-profit, I’m going to be teaching people with special needs intro to CS with Scratch
Volunteering @ PSS:
40 hours for an organization that helps special needs kids learn to make friends by playing sports
Volunteering @ Luv Michael:
40 hours raising money to give special needs adults paychecks
Participation in business club:
Planning to apply for vice president next year
Took part in two national competitions:
Diamond Challenge: Created an idea and presented it to judges (Didn’t win but made it through an elimination round)
Wharton Challenge: Created a stock portfolio (Didn’t win)
JV Tennis:
2 hours practice everyday after school and I play matches for them
Guitar
Essays/LORs/Other (Optionally, guess how strong these are and include any other relevant information or circumstances.)
I have a pretty extraordinary family background, but I want to keep it a secret. I think I’ll write pretty good essays because of this
LORs:
AP Chem: I think that I was one of the only kids who ended with an A+. I was the second most tryhard kid in the class and I think I’m one of the star students. Out of 10, I think that I’ll rank this letter as an 8.
Pre-calc Honors: I was literally one of the teacher’s pets. I think he liked my participation and academics in his class. He literally emailed me saying that my letter will be easy to write. Out of 10, I think that I’ll rank this letter as a 10.
Guidance Counselor: I was like the only one who actively emailed her and consulted her. I think I’ll give this ranking a 9/10.
Cost Constraints / Budget
No cost constraints or financial aid
Schools
I’m estimating what I think my chances are next to them
CS will mean many of the colleges will be more selective. For example, UIUC CS is much more selective than UIUC generally. Same with Purdue. Both may admit CS applicants to alternate majors or general undeclared; changing into CS after enrolling means another highly competitive admission process.
UIUC, Purdue and UMD are absolutely not safeties. With the GPA that I’m estimating and your SAT, they are likely high match to reaches. I wouldn’t consider UT Austin safe for CS OOS either.
You have far too many reaches. Pick one, maybe two. Double back and concentrate on your safeties. A safety is a school where your chance of admission is 100% and yo know you can afford it.
What do you care about in a school? Size? Location? Weather? Support for hobbies? Etc?
CS is an extremely competitive major. To get into a Top15 college your SAT needs to be 1550+. And you should have maxed out on AP courses offered by your school and have a near-perfect GPA.
RIP. I’m trying to improve my SAT to at least a 1560 because I think I can do it, but I can’t do much about my GPA and AP courses as even if I get all A’s, which I’m planning on doing next year, it’s still not going to increase much. Do I even have a chance at any of my reaches?
I don’t really have a chance for my reaches or targets, do I? I’m working on improving my SAT, getting a research opportunity with a professor, and getting a leadership opportunity at a club, but I don’t think I can improve my overall GPA. If I get all A’s next year, the overall doesn’t even go up by much cuz of how bad my freshman year is. Without counting that, it’s a near 4.0
If you have a good reason for doing poorly in freshman year you will have the opportunity to explain it in the college app. It doesn’t completely kill your opportunities.
Not only that, you need to remember that public schools tend to accept higher percentages of in-state schools and sometimes are mandated to have their admitted class composed of a certain percent of in-state students. So, while you might look at their stats for their admit class and think you fit in there well, it’s completely different when you’re an out of state student. I agree with others that schools like UIUC and Purdue are hard admits for out of state CS majors!
You need safeties that are TRUE safeties. And that includes being able to afford them.
I am curious about your non-profit. Is it registered as a 501c3? What kinds of disabilities and are the participants all adults? What kinds of “interactions” are involved if any besides the ones you listed. How many CS skills have you used in this endeavor? That could help you perhaps.
Yes, it’s an official, registered non-profit organization. The participants are mainly kids with autism, but we have a couple of adults. Interactions include volunteers reading to them using zoom; weekly art sessions; weekly dance sessions; and organized events where we have also found special guest speakers. There’s much, much more to my organization such as how we’ve created leadership ranks, but I think it’s too much to go into for now. For CS skills, I only developed a program to help the volunteers pair with participants (it’s hard to describe without context behind the purpose). And my team and I have planned that I could teach CS myself over summer to our special needs participants.
If you’re interested in the UC schools and okay with the high OOS cost, the good news there is that freshman grades are not included in the UC GPA.
Calculate your UC GPA here: GPA Calculator for the University of California – RogerHub
For OOS students, only AP/IB classes count as “honors”…but weighting for these is also capped at 8 semesters, and you have enough actual AP classes to max that out. Once you have calculated your GPA based on the UC formula, you might want to start a UC specific thread in the UC forum - there are some very knowledgeable people there who will help you to calibrate your chances and your application strategy.
Canadian universities also don’t consider freshman grades, and there are some great CS schools with a very straightforward application process, so it might be worth considering a few of those, too.
What is your training in this field, and what training do volunteers have on autism. One of my kids did extensive training before working with this population.
Oh man, I can apply to UC’s but I thought that since I improved my grades, 9th grade can “slide” you know what I mean. I’m applying to a lot of UC’s but for other colleges, can it “slide” though?
I don’t have extensive training, but my close family member has been diagnosed with autism. I’ve been learning how to interact with kids on the spectrum and how to help them through him, his aids, and our parents. The volunteers have little training because they’re all high school kids. We’ve created a leadership position called “volunteer reps”, and those guys guide them to an extent. However, most participants have still significantly benefited from our programs, and that is why we have more than 65 of them in our program. Parents really love it, I can attest to that
Grades from 9th grade will not be calculated into GPAs for UCs, but will be visible to admission readers. Grades from 9th grade do need to be C or higher for the course to be counted toward UC a-g subject requirements. One thing about the UC a-g subject requirements that many out-of-state applicants do not know ahead of time is one year of high school art (same type for courses broken into semesters), or a semester college art course, or high enough AP or IB art score: Subject requirement (A-G) | UC Admissions .
CSUs in California calculate HS GPA like the UC weighted-capped version, except that college courses count as two courses and two grades. CPSLO is the one CSU that includes 9th grade course grades into HS GPA calculations. CSUs plug HS GPA into a formula to rank applicants for admission.
Know that UCs will be full pay OOS and are all large lectures (intro to CS at UCB has over 1000 students) and heavy reliance on TAs for discussions and labs. Do not assume by the rank that they are a good fit. One person I know referred to Berkeley as “like going to school at the DMV.” Do you homework. Find the right fit. It may be a UC, but don’t just assume that based on their selectivity or ranking. Both UCLA and UCB do a great job at placing CS students though.