Attended one of the best high schools in Chicago, was involved in multiple clubs and organizations, volunteered in Beijing for 3 weeks, and then Arusha, Tanzania for 7 weeks. 3.7 GPA and a 35 ACT.
I applied to seven schools:
USC
Tulane
Brown
Columbia
NYU
Hopkins
Northwestern
(I know this looks a little cocky, but this was the list I was encouraged to pursue. Looking back I definitely would have applied to more safety schools. I’d also stay away from the prepscholar “chance of admission” section if you know what I mean)
I was accepted to one: NYU (with no financial aid)
Deciding to not pay 79k a year for an undergraduate degree, I frantically looked up schools with rolling admissions and stumbled across Indiana University Bloomington, where I ended up going for the first semester of college. hated it. I then transferred to the university of illinois and I like it, but there is still so much resentment and bad feelings about the college process and what had led me to where I am currently.
I guess I just want to know why I didn’t get into the schools I was really confident about- USC, Tulane, and Northwestern (so many people from my school go there now.)
There are no guarantees. Maybe they wanted a dancer instead. Maybe it was your essays. Maybe they wanted someone who spent their summers working a job. Who knows. Your mistake was a lack of safeties both in terms of admissions and affordability. CC warns people of this all the time.
So it’s been over a year since you received your decisions. It’s well past time to move on. You’re at a great school and you like it. That’s a big win. Embrace what you have and stop looking in the rear view mirror.
I would think the 3.7 put you outside the top-tenth of your HS class? RD rate at Northwestern is just around 7%. Most people with identical stats and no hook won’t get into NU.
Your pre-college achievement shows that your are capable of excelling not matter where you go to college. You will be fine.
High-ranked high schools are a thing of the past. There are great students everywhere, and most of the time, the students at the great schools don’t understand this.
So hard for young kids to do, but if anyone ever thinks less of you because you didn’t go to one of those schools, they’re not worth your time.
“volunteered in Beijing for 3 weeks, and then Arusha, Tanzania” come across as #things an upper middle class kid would do to pad his college app on the advise of a consultant.
If your essays also gave off a contrived vibe, that might have been part of what held you back.
You were right to reach high - but your mistake was the list you made: you had only two matches (NYU, Tulane) and zero safeties. A good list would be built from the ground up:
1° 2 affordable safeties you like (could be UIUC and UWI, for instance, but those are hard to predict in terms of safety v. match v. reach due to the big difference between, say, majoring in Finance or CS on the one hand, and majoring in Russian or Agricultural Development on the other.)
2° 4-5 Matches: for your stats, it’d mean 4-5 colleges with acceptance rates in the 30-45% range, which you shower with interest (that means filling out the request info form, going on a visit if you live within driving distance, etc)
3° Among category 1 and 2, at least 2-3 should be EA or Rolling, with admissions arriving before the holidays in December.
4° ONLY THEN do you add reaches.
As to why all these universities didn’t admit you:
tracable interest/lack thereof, poor interview, lukewarm recommendation letters, not standing out from others in your school and in your pool of applicants. The biggest being: acceptance rate. It means a majority of rejected applicants will be qualified. You were qualified but you weren’t selected in the next step.
You’re now at UIUC, so congratulations, it’s a fantastic university and you’re very lucky your parents can afford it so that you are in college rather than stuck in a gap year you didn’t want.
@cbickk, just curious if you wouldn’t mind sharing what you didn’t like about IU Bloomington. D21 is thinking of going there as she wants to try for DA to Kelley School of Business. Glad you found a school you ended up liking.
