Hello! I am an international student from Europe. To begin with my scores are as follows: GPA, i have not really calculated my GPA yet mainly because i still got 1 year left in high school to improve them but as of right now i have 19.1 / 20 where 20 is the max in my country. I took the “old” SAT and scored 2210, is it worth taking the new one? I have like no EC:s at all, i have been working part time for a bit while in school if that even counts as an EC? When i finish i will have taken all the math and English courses there is in my country offered for high school students.
So the schools then:
Boston university(Would need a large amount of merit aid)
UW Madison (Would need a small amount of merit aid)
Carnegie Mellon university(Would need a large amount of merit aid)
University of Arizona(Would need a small amount of merit aid)
University of Minnesota Twin-cities(Would not need aid at all)
Northeastern university(Would need a large amount of merit aid)
USC(Would need a large amount of merit aid)
University of Georgia(Would need a small amount of merit aid)
As you probably noticed i do need some kind of merit scholarship to attend most of the schools with a cost of attendance over 42k a year. I know that the schools above do offer merit aid to internationals, am i competitive though? I wanna major in computer science, are there any schools that i have not mentioned that are strong in that subject and offer merit aid to internationals? i would rather attend a university than a liberal arts college. I would like to add UT Austin on the list but i dont think they offer merit aid to internationals.
How about ASU and SDSU, are they respectable schools?
SDSU and ASU would respectable colleges for engineering/computer science but they are not on par with USC or UW Madison in International name recognition. ASU would offer some merit aid for International applicants, but SDSU offers little to no merit aid for International applicants due to be a state funded public. Mainly, SDSU offers need based FA for in-state California applicants.
@Gumbymom Hm, thats what I thought. How about the other schools? Do you think i am competitive for UW Madison and USC? I would not be able to attend USC without at least a half tuition scholarship, do USC give away scholarships for just high scores or do you need to have a lot of EC:s to have a shot of getting one? Is my 2210 SAT considered the “average” for those kind of scholarships?
You have a decent chance at USC and they do like high test scores. I am not very familiar with UW Madison, so I defer to other posters. You should run the net price calculators on the school websites to see if these schools will be financially viable options. Even with 1/2 tuition at USC, you are looking at $40K/year or more in tuition/fees/housing.
If you have one more year of high school left, I’d definitely try to make it worth it. A lot of these schools look for students that have something to contribute, so it would be good if you tried out for a sport or participated in extracurricular next year. If your school has a computer club, join that for example. It especially looks good if you do volunteer work.
I don’t think it’s worth taking the new SAT again, as you already did pretty well on the old one. I’d probably take a couple of SAT Subject Tests (competitive colleges look for 2), though. I recommend doing Mathemetics 2 if you want to major in computer science.