I am planning to apply to Carnegie Mellon for Mechanical Engineering next fall with the following stats:
Freshmen GPA: Unweighted: 3.52 Weighted: 4.8963 (Weird Scale)
Sophomore GPA: Unweighted: 3.50 Weighted: 4.7906
Current Grades: APUSH-88, AP Stats-90, English III Honors-87, Honors Chemistry-95
Overall APs: AP Stats, APUSH, AP Calc AB, AP English Lit and Comp, AP Physics C (Both)
Honors: All
Class Rank: 55/495
SAT: 1440 750 M, 690 CRW
Extracurriculars: Robotics Team Business President (20+ hours/week), Freshmen Soccer, NHS
CMU is an extremely competitive school for undergraduate engineering.
Your UW GPA might be a bit too low (CMU engineering avg. - 3.88), as is your SAT (barely in the middle 50%). Additionally, your ECs are somewhat generic (and lacking), as I would imagine many current Carnegie Mellon students have leadership roles in engineering clubs plus many engineering-related awards. 2 activities is a bit too little for all 4 years of high school (freshman soccer is only 1 year).
By all means, you can shoot for it ED and hope for the best, but it’s a reach for even the most gifted of students.
@CruxKee. Sorry, but CMU is super competitive, and you would need something special to get their attention. The grades alone I don’t feel would cut it. My son is sitting on a near UW 99.5% average in all courses over 4 years - and only took honors and AP level classes, and a 35 ACT, with 4 year varsity letter in 2 sports, including captain of the hockey team, 100s hours of community service - and it will still be a reach if he got accepted here.
But if CMU is your dream school, take a shot - why not - but bring something to the table that overcomes your GPA. Again not that its bad (its good) - but everyone applying to CMU has near perfect GPAs
Being near the top 10% will help adcoms see that perfect grades are harder to get at your school.
Ask your guidance counselor if your school has sent anyone to CMU in previous years and how you compare.
CMU will be a reach for you. Whether or not it will be a reasonable reach may depend upon your class rank–although CMU reports class rank for only half of its incoming class–and the strength of your high school coursework.
I would agree with the above commenters. I have a few questions: 1) do you fit into a URM/ female in engineering and 2) what math are you currently taking (also, when are you taking AP Physics?) for me, when I had my interview in august (I applied RD) my interviewer was very impressed that I’m a female taking Multi Variable Calc because not many female engineers are so advanced in math, or something like that. I don’t fully know the reasoning, but my interviewer’s eyes opened when he saw how much math I do. I don’t do math outside of school, so no math teams or competitions. Just putting it out there. Good luck!