I am currently a sophomore and my current gpa is a 3.5 UW and a 4.2 W. I go to a very rigorous magnet school. It ranks high in my state and I am in the IB program. I know my gpa is pretty low, but I am in the top 12% in my class. I am also taking honors classes online in order to boost my gpa.
I am a black (Nigerian) female and I want to become a neuroscientist.
extracurriculars:
International Students’ Association club
Biomedical Club
Robotics club
member of the Teen Advisory Board at my library
I was a contributing photographer for an online magazine in my freshman yr
I volunteer as a part of the PeaceJam confrence yearly
I volunteer at the library during the summer
Secretary of my city’s Gavel club (for teenagers)
member of the Joe Berg Society (seminar series)
I also do freelance photography on my spare time (I might write about it in my college app essay idk lol)
Please be as honest as possible. My gpa has been bothering me for quite a while now.
So if you’re in the top 12% of your class, you’ve got a decent chance, it’ll depend a lot on other parts of yor application. But, you’re a sophomore, so you’ve got 3 more semesters to bump your GPA. No college is going to look just at the pure GPA, they’ll look at it in context. Getting it up can’t hurt, and you’ve got the time to do it, but other parts of your application will be just as, if not more, important.
For ECs, try to get into positions of office within clubs. I don’t think the Ivies have been reporting the average freshman admit’s GPA on the CDS (for recent year s anyways), but like previous posters said, get good grades for the rest of the year and for the entirety of Junior year, knock your SAT/SAT II/ACT out of the park, then come back and show off those acceptances
My advice is to stop worrying about “top 20”. It is meaningless. You can be as successful in life from a lower ranked school. Do your best for grades and test scores, do ECs you like.
I agree with the prior advice. You are smart enough to know you have an URM hook, but that only goes so far. Elite schools want to know you can do the work there, there are a lot of kids with 4.0 UW GPA and perfect SAT scores who don’t get in.
I don’t think your EC’s are super impressive, but they don’t have to be.
@3puppies what extracurricluar activities do you think will be impressive enough? i am applying for an internship at a local hospital of mine so that I can have the opportunity to develop a science fair project. Next year, I’ll be applying for a computer science internship at Citi. I am also going to be running for a leadership position in my Biomedical club. If I get into those programs, would it help my application a lot?
An internship while in high school is almost always worthwhile, and leadership positions are desirable - but the point is that your activities show something about you as a person. What are the things you care about?
The more I have talked with admissions folks at elite schools, the impression kept getting stronger that they truly could not care much less about all the clubs that people join, just to be able to say they are in clubs, or they had a leadership position, etc. They understand all too well that things like NHS may be a very active, service oriented organization in some schools, but very perfunctory, almost meaningless fluff in other schools. Teen Advisory Board at the library may not mean much in some high schools where the kids almost never do anything, but in other schools/libraries, the TAB commit to fundraising and helping get signatures to get state money on a half-million dollar expansion. A library TAB group that gets together bi-monthly to play games is not the same as the one that gets together twice a week to help develop a new library web site.
Elite colleges are impressed by kids whose activities mean something for them or for their community. Try to identify what needs are not being met, and figure out how to solve them - and remember the colleges can often smell the difference if an activity is completed for the right motives.
I don’t mean to pick on you or your EC’s - I must have missed your freelance photography when I glanced earlier, as that sounds pretty cool. But I am sure that you realize colleges will know the difference between saying you love photography mostly because you like selfies for InstaSnapTwitFace, versus you talking about the joy in getting your shots published in a newspaper or magazine, etc.
How about using your photography them to take pictures of the crumbling ceiling tiles and rusty pipes in the library or school? Then try sharing those pics with the town Board of Ed or Board of Finance to stop their proposed maintenance cuts, or to advocate for long overdue needed improvements.
You seem like an amazing applicant, but there are also people in the IB program who have 4.0s. My only advice is that you increase your GPA by the end of junior year, bc junior year grades matter a lot! Make sure you have a good SAT/ACT score, and I think you can get in to several top 20 colleges (as long as your essays are phenomenal)!
I would really appreciate if anyone would could predict my admission decisions from Yale, Brown, and Cornell
GPA AND BACKGROUND
3.92 GPA
White female, New York
~80k income per year
COLLEGE DECISIONS SO FAR
Accepted at Bard, Syracuse, Williams, Sarah Lawrence, Boston Univ
CLASS RANK
3/130
SAT
1490 (new) 760 math, 730 english
SAT II’s
730 Chemistry, 780 US History, 800 Lit
AP CLASSES
AP US History (5) AP Calc (3) only have 5 AP’s at my school
SENIOR YEAR CLASSES
AP Literature, AP Calc BC, AP Bio, College French, Independent Study English, Band, Advanced Econ
EXTRACURRICULARS
Debate President (11-12)
Band (9-12)
Jazz (9-12)
Student Newspaper Editor (10-12)
Started a new club to welcome new students (11-12)
NHS (11-12)
Bowling Team Captain (9-12)
Write for local paper (10-12)
Math club co-founder
AWARDS
Highest average in a bunch of stuff
Chosen and attended Girls State
STAC All east for Bowling
Many LD debate wins
chosen and attended 2 Leadership conferences
you probably should have probably made another thread lol. were the leadership confrences you attended selective? if not, i don’t think they will give you much leverage. what is your intended major? all in all you seem like a strong applicant. i think you’ll have a shot at cornell and brown; idk about yale though. congrats on your acceptances!
can you chance me as well by answering my question? thanks
You know that your chances are low- b/c you are smart enough to know that colleges who accept less than 10% of their applicants are turning down 90+% of the applicants.
Take Brown, so often dissed as a ‘lower’ ivy. It has one of the highest ivy admit rates, at 9.1%. Last year they turned down 27, 519 applicants, the vast majority of whom were well qualified applicants. Note that only 172 of the 2,877 students admitted were not in the top10% of their class.
Work really hard over the next months to identify some other colleges that you could actually love. It is easy to love the top names- the names your parents and peers will be impressed by. You will have no trouble writing those ‘why us’ essays when the time comes. But, you need to be able to write some great ‘why us’ essays for some colleges where you are not just extremely likely to get in, but would be happy to attend. If you don’t need them in 2 years time, no harm done. But if you do need them, it will make all the difference.
