Hi! I am currently a rising junior at a large and competitive public high school in the northern DFW (TX) area. I want to know how if these stats are good enough for the following schools: Georgia Tech, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UW Seattle, UC San Diego, Rice University, maybe UCLA/Cal Berkeley but those two are stretches. Before anyone points this out, I’m applying to more schools and safeties, I’ve just added these few for now because these are my reaches/targets.
Demographics:
Indian
Upper Middle Class
Academics:
4.05 W/3.88 UW GPA cumulative (as of 1st semester sophomore year, I can give a better result when my updated transcript arrives in four days)
I’m around 342/1737 and top 20%
10 or 11 APs by the end of high school (1 freshman year that I got a 5 on, 1 sophomore year, 4 junior year, and 4/5 senior year)
Ecs, I want to get an officer position in about 2-3 of these:
Student Council (9)
Public Library Volunteer (9-12)
NJHS (9)
Own initiative called InSight with a friend surrounding mental health awareness. We’ve had this implemented as a fundraiser for our school’s HopeSquad chapter but haven’t done much with it but want to. (9-12)
Model UN (10-12)
DECA (10-12)
Peer Leadership, I mentor younger kids (10-11/12, I don’t know if I will have time in 12th)
Principal’s Advisory Team (10-12)
NHS (10-12)
Self started club, branch of PPE society or Amnesty International that I will be the co-president of (11-12)
My School has the opportunity to intern with the Credit Union of Texas so I’ll try for this (12)
Applied for a business role internship with Texas Environmental Action Movement and will get my decision in 2 weeks
Will apply for an internship with my congressional district’s representative. Applied for this last year and didn’t get in.
This is also a huge stretch…but I have a passion for writing and i’m extremely good at it and have won good awards (see below), so I decided to write a fiction novel that is so far at 93 pages and 25,500 words, and I’ve been working on this since November of 2024. I want to hopefully get this published by summer of 2026.
Awards:
Outstanding Effort in Biology (9)
Honorable Mention in Scholastic Poetry (9)
Honorable Delegate Award 2024 TXMUN (Model UN) Fall Summit (10)
Scholastic Gold Key in Poetry (10) - I’ve heard this is good but I have no idea how special it is.
Scholastic Silver Key in Poetry (10)
Shooting for an AP Scholar award (11/12)
Currently trying for JLI Essay competition but this is a stretch but nice if I get shortlisted
Just an explanation for the lack of freshmen year ECs, my school has an entirely seperate campus and administration for freshmen, and we go to the main high school after sophomore year. The Freshmen campus is pretty closed off from the main campus, and there weren’t many good clubs or opportunities.
Thanks for taking the time to read all of this and please feel free to reach out if you have questions!!
I would suggest it is premature to assess your competitiveness for these sorts of colleges without knowing your junior-year grades or standardized test scores. Instead, at this point I think the most valuable thing you can be doing is seriously explore what different colleges are like, so you can refine your sense of what you are really looking for in a four-year college experience, both academically and non-academically.
Like, for example, Rice is a very different sort of college from the large public universities on your stated list. Is that something you would value? If so, there would be more options to explore that would be along those lines.
Grading scales vary somewhat between high schools. Using ranking I think makes it more likely that we can guess your chances with at least slightly better chances of being accurate.
I think that these are all reaches. I think that you have a chance for admissions, but I would not call any of them likely. I might wildly guess that UC San Diego is the most likely, but I am not sure that I could explain why you would choose it over your very good in-state schools.
I would not shoot for officer positions for the purpose of applying to universities. I would shoot for officer positions if you can legitimately help the club or activity. Be genuine. Be yourself. Whatever you do, do it well.
Mentoring younger kids is a good EC.
Make sure that you are happy with your safeties. In some ways they might be the most important schools on the list.
Note that those RePEc rankings are based on research publication volume, which may matter if you want to go into economics research (you are a pre-PhD student), but not so much if you are more pre-professional (“business”).
Note also that the liberal arts colleges’ research publication volume is much lower; the #1 in the liberal arts college ranking is #48 in the overall ranking.
For the UCs, you can recalculate your HS GPA (see link in post #4) and compare the weighted-capped version to the ranges shown at Freshman admission by discipline | University of California for each UC campus (economics is a social science). Also note the admission rates.
Georgia Tech, UCLA, & UC-Berkeley are very high reaches.
Not sure that leadership roles in ECs will help much with any of these schools. Check out any available CDS reports for the schools to see what factors are considered important to the admissions office.
And despite not ranking high in research studies, many LACs rank very high in studies of per capita placement in Economics PhD programs, such as can be found here:
I think the bottom line is there are many different ways to get a great undergraduate education in Economics, indeed different definitions of what that would actually mean depending on the reasons you are interested in studying Economics.
Which on the one hand is good news in the sense you can reasonably consider a lot of different colleges depending on what you really want in terms of an education, and in fact anything else you are hoping to get out of a college experience.
But that is “bad” news in the sense figuring out which of those many and diverse options really makes the most sense for you is not as simple as going down any one list. It takes time to investigate, and reflect.
But that isn’t really bad news, because the OP has that time.
You don’t need more safeties if you are happy with the ones you named. Those are extremely likely.
I agree most of the other schools you mention are reaches. Any school with an acceptance rate below about 20 percent is a reach for everyone, even very strong students like you. Getting a good test score and keeping your grades high, and ranking high in your class are also important. If you can get into the top 10 percent by the end of your junior year that would help. Having said that…when you see these schools that say 90 percent of their admits are in the top 10 percent of their class…bear in mind that in many cases a majority of students don’t report rank at all. For example, at Rice 91% of those who report rank are in the top 10 percent of their class, but 60 percent of admitted students did not report a rank at all. My children attend(ed) 3 different competitive schools in Texas and plenty of excellent students who are not in the top 10 percent get in to schools like Rice, GA Tech, and competitive UCs. But most don’t…again they are reaches for all. I suggest you check data from your own school on admits to these schools to see how you compare to other students from your school who get in.
That’s because most schools in the country dont rank. It doesnt mean they werent in the top 10%.
For example, my daughter was the Salutatorian. We live in New England at a very competitive HS. The school doesnt rank so our counselor wrote it into her recommendations that she was #2. Also, it was evident by her GPA relative to the other kids.
Most kids who attend Rice are at the very near top of their class unless you attend a super well known prep school like Spence in NY or are a recruited athlete, or have some other hook.
Not necessarily more, but are you sure those are the right Likely colleges for you?
Like, how did you pick them? What did you consider their strengths from your perspective? Are there things you would also want/prefer in a college experience that they don’t really offer? Did you look for alternatives that might offer those things?
Of course you might already have carefully considered all these questions. But since none of those are very similar to Rice, and for that matter are not on the West Coast like many of your other colleges, I wonder if you have looked at Likelies that might be closer to those sorts of colleges in relevant ways.
As an aside, I prefer the term Likely to Safety in part for just this reason. The word “Safety” I think sometimes suggests to people the only virtue it really needs is a high chance of admission, and hopefully you will only even consider it in an absolute emergency.
But then when people end up having to attend a “Safety” they did not choose carefully, they are often pretty upset. And often they could in fact have found a much more suitable option, if they had looked.
And in fact, sometimes people end up really loving one of their Likelies, including sometimes because of merit or other special offers. And they choose it over a Target or even Reach offer.
Yes most kids who attend rice are very highly ranked. Just not all in the top 10 percent when you come from a competitive school, as OP says they do. At my 3 kids’ competitive schools plenty of people in the top quarter of the class get into T20 colleges…and they are NOT super duper schools like Spence…just competitive schools. Thus my advice to OP to look at the actual outcomes from their own school vs. just looking at the CDS data that speaks to the entire admit class.
This is especially true in Texas at UT Austin. At one of my kids’ schools fully one-third of the class was admitted to UT Austin. Of course it varies A LOT by major…but no matter how you look at the data…getting 150+ students into UT Austin is a far different outcome than the general data that shows that the admit rate for non-auto admit is just 10 percent. Your actual school outcomes are often very informative to assessing your chances. I think for UT Austin College of Liberal Arts Economics your chances are probably pretty good.
I agree with @Bruno99 and others that you do not need more safeties as long as you are happy with the safeties that you have.
I am assuming that you have also taken a good look at Texas A&M. Whether you feel that it would be a good fit for you of course is important. UT Austin looks like it might be a reach, but might also be worth at least thinking about.
I have one comment relating to economics. I was a math major in university, but took a few economics classes and liked them. The last one that I took was econometrics (quantitative economics). I liked it quite a bit. To me this takes economics out of the realm of “my opinion, your opinion” and into the realm of things that can be verified through actual numbers. However, as a math major econometrics still had me spending a Saturday afternoon making sure that I was solid in my understanding of linear algebra. Statistics is another part of math that is likely to show up somewhere in four years of studying economics, and it would not surprise me if calculus and differential equations show up at some point. Apparently some mathematics can be valuable for an economics major, and at least to me this seems to be a good thing.