Right now I’m planning on going to tech university, in order to receive the best education that I can. Most of the schools that I want to go to my grades/GPA/ACT are high enough to be in the top 90%, but there are a few reach colleges that I still want to apply for. Right now as a side-project to school, I’m building a physics engine from scratch, which is definitely an above average technical and mathematical task for someone(just 1 person) who hasn’t had a formal college education in either of those things. My question, is that when I am finished, should I go public with the code? And by that, I mean starting a website to distribute the engine, and a git repo to make it open source. If I do that, will it help my chances of getting into a more prestigious college at all? This won’t be my only project though, it should only take me a couple months to complete, and then afterwards I can work on more “innovative” things(I only say that because there are several other physics engines on the market).
And if having prior experience in the major that I am applying for is good(which I would suspect it is), then how exactly am I supposed to show that to the college admissions office? Send them a link to my website? How do I prove that I actually developed the engine, and didn’t just copy & paste?
You can see my other threads if you need my stats, or just ask and I will save you the trouble.
I don’t see that a personal project like this with no competition success or external validation of the quality is probably much good in admissions. At most colleges admissions won’t want to see it, nor could they make heads or tails from it.
When you said “work related to my major,” I thought you meant a job or an internship, where you work with professionals, per their standards, learning from the real environment. Or something collaborative. Those are valued, depending. You may want to look up the story about the kid who built a nuclear reactor in his garage. And his results with MIT.
With no vetting of your work, adcoms would be going on your say-so. I’m not discouraging you. Just saying how you proceed matters.
Well right now I’m working(actual work), as a Cloud Administrator for a startup, but I already knew that would help with college.
“no external validation of quality”? I’ll be going public with the code, meaning that I will set up a website to distribute a product. No doubt someone will use it for their small-scale indie game, and that would seem to me to be a good validation of my work. I’ve done things like this before, and it’s often surprising the amount of people who will go with products that nobody has ever heard of before from small companies.
When I was looking at the MIT admission “suggestions”, they repeatedly emphasized that extra-curricular activities were extremely important. Just because I’m not doing this through some academic contest, doesn’t discount the value that doing this before hand will have. For my other projects, they won’t be like physics-engines, they’re going to be to the best of my ability, something that hasn’t been seen before. As a junior, I’d be really surprised if colleges only cared about the academic achievements of their applicants, and didn’t have any sort of program in place to look at students who are already learning(or have learned), their intended major.
I know that with no proof that I did the work, they won’t care. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m asking how do I prove that I did in fact develop this software, and how much it will help my case.
Thank you.
What are your current grades and test scores?
GPA 3.9, will have 32+ ACT this summer