Don't worry about SATs and GPA: that stuff is more of a formality for Chicago, and they really don't care. However, when I say GPA I don't mean your transcript, as that is very important. What I mean to say is that Chicago wants to see that you're a well-rounded intellectual, that you challenge yourself with everything your school offers and, for some of us, even more than your school offers. This obviously will depend on your school and location. There are three main things that matter to get into Chicago: essays, letters of recommendation, and your transcript. Achievements and extracurriculars come next. Numbers, as Chicago says many, many times, even in the letter of acceptance, don't really matter here. They want to know how you think, who you are as a person, how you express yourself as a person--the qualities of your character, not the silly quantities of GPA and SAT scores; this approach is what makes Chicago so special and able to attract and admit such a special, unrivaled in qualification group of students (even moreso than, in my opinion, Harvard, depending on what's important to you in a student body), and it's important to realize that, I believe, if you want to go here.
Anyway, here are my stats for kicks:
800V/700M/680W (I took it once and never again as I despise standardized testing and knew selective colleges don't actually care about SAT as long as you make a certain range--especially Chicago)
800 Spanish / 710 Math II / 700 Chemistry
AP Psych freshman year
AP music theory, AP Spanish sophomore year
AP calc AB independent study, AP chemistry, AP English language junior year
AP English lit, AP US gov't, AP microecon, AP macroecon, independent study AP physics C: mechanics, independent study AP physics C: e&M.
(I've passed all the tests I've taken so far, but Chicago doesn't know that. Also, to a large extent these are all the APs my school offers save for AP bio and AP American history, and the very small number of students taking APs would make it impossible to take them all.)
Band captain, trumpet section leader, lead trumpet, soloist, basically lots of music. I mentioned that as a hobby I like to compose music, but I sent in no samples. President of mu alpha theta math team, member for 4 years of academic team (3 years varsity). I have tutored students of all ages.
My letters of recommendation were fantastic, and I sent in an optional one from my music teacher as I've taken 7 courses with him, plus all the outside-of-school time I spend with him.
It's also worth mentioning that I go to a not-very-good school (66% collegebound, I believe) and I come from an underprivileged background: my parents came here from Cuba about a year before I was born and both have only high school degrees.
I believe my essays were some of the best I've ever written. I made them extremely personal and talked about things as close to my heart as I could, because I knew that's what they wanted: they want to know who you are. I talked about video games and music, pretty much. And they obviously liked this: I received the competitive College Honors Scholarship, awarded to 20 applicants, so I definitely believe with Chicago--and any other competitive school, for that matter--you really just need to be as real and as personal as you can be. This isn't an academic paper: this is who you are. Passive voice and linking verbs are fine
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