Asian Male for CS - ED Schools? Reverse Chance? Chances?

Chance Me / Match Me
1

Upcoming Junior. I want to know how competitive of an applicant I am.

Single parent income, but high. Ran NPCs on some schools. Dartmouth estimated $40 in aid whereas MIT estimated over $10k. Confused. I’ve had this discussion; my parents have always made saving for college a priority, so paying for college will not be an issue. It’d be nice to not pay $70k a year tho.

Largest public school in New Hampshire. I’m basically the only Asian in my grade of ~450 kids.

ACT: 36 (Single-sitting, right before the whole COVID-19 thing started. Lucky.)
GPA UW: 3.98
Class rank: Probably first, school doesn’t rank
APs (Should be all 5s):
Freshman - Calc AB
Sophomore - Calc BC, Physics C Mech, Com Sci A, US History
Junior - Gov, Lang (taking Calc 3 and Differential Equations w/ Linear Algebra at state uni)
Senior (tentative) - Spanish, Macro/Micro, Lit, Stats, Chem
Every other class I took was an honors class. Certainly the most rigorous course load at my school.

EC’s (no particular order):
Will be captain of varsity soccer senior year & 3-time letter winner, at arguably the top D1 sports school in NH. Hopefully I can get all-state. Soccer used to be my life before high school but I shifted my focus to academics.

Cofounder of a website to help promote geographic literacy, a very large project with many features, large user-base. Currently in the process of hosting a bee in replacement of this year’s cancelled geography bee, had 550 signups from 12 different countries. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to name it here, but if you are interested at taking a look send me a pm.

Geography bee coaching for free - does this count as volunteering? (coached state champions) I came top ten in geography bee nationals out of ~3 million students in 8th grade, I love helping others succeed in the competition.

Leader of Vex Robotics (helped start up the program as a freshman, our school was new to robotics and so was I), went to states.

Have another big web development project that I will be starting soon, but I’m not 100% sure yet so I won’t say it here.

I’m also working on an app for the Congressional App Challenge. My district is small so I should be able to win next year.

Internship at state flagship for a theoretical physics professor (focuses in topology and magnetism). Started a few weeks ago but it’s been going great, and I actually enjoy it. I’ve been programming algorithms from scratch to do some interesting things like triangulating toruses to find topological indices.

Competitive Programming - I think I’ll get USACO Gold this winter, but I won’t have time to prepare for Platinum.

Co-authoring a book called “50 People. 50 Stories. The Asian Experience.” It’s quite a large-scale project, will be finished in September.

Clubs at my school are weak, everyone cares about sports but very few people take clubs seriously. I might join NHS/Rho Kappa/Math and Science Honors Societies but if they aren’t worth it, I might not.

High Reach: MIT, CMU, Cornell, Dartmouth, Caltech
Reach: Georgia Tech, UW Madison, UMichigan, Purdue
Target: UIUC (applying CS + Geography, much easier to get in that regular CS, considering my ECs are CS and geography related and knowing the stats of people who got admitted to this program, I think it’s a target)
Safety: UNH

Should I ED to a school? My dream school is MIT and to play soccer there, but they don’t have ED. I will contact their coach after my junior season. I don’t plan on playing soccer at any other colleges. Obviously it’s a crapshoot and I’m likely not going to get accepted.

Are there any other schools I should think about? And what are the chances I get into some of the schools listed?

My stats are decent, but my ECs are a bit weak. I don’t have as many ECs as some other people I’ve seen on this site, but I enjoy them and I think that matters more. I don’t see the point in cramming your day with ECs and to be constantly sleep-deprived. I haven’t done much volunteering besides coaching for free. Any suggestions would be great.

Thank you for your time.

2

Bump. Also forgot to mention that I’m tutoring Chinese students in English for free, not like that is an S tier EC but I think it’s fun.

3

You are a good candidate for your reaches.

I would look further afield than just the northeast. Look at California schools. University of Waterloo and University of Toronto in Canada will give you a great education at a lower cost than the US private schools.

Do you have an idea of what type of job you want after college?

4

@bouders Probably something to do with computer science and geography, maybe GIS or working at Google Maps. Ultimately, I want to use technology to help people appreciate and learn about the world we live in—this is becoming increasingly more important.

My parents don’t really want me going to the West Coast, yet interestingly enough they also want me to apply to UW because they say there’s a solid job market around Seattle. I’m not sure if I can apply to UCs, because I didn’t take the ACT essay. They’ve also never even heard of Harvey Mudd or some of the other schools around there.

Thanks for the tip about Canadian Universities—they seem cheaper than some of the schools here. I’ll look into them.

5

UC’s accept either the SAT or ACT with essay, but they are test optional for the 2021 and 2022 admission cycles. The issue is costs since OOS students get little to no financial aid so you are looking at around $65K/year to attend a UC.

6

@Gumbymom That’s still cheaper than what NPCs have estimated for me for most private schools like Dartmouth and CMU. Only MIT’s NPC estimated significant aid for me. Might have to try convincing them to let me study a few thousand miles away.

7

I recommend looking into the software engineering major too.

8

I think you have a clear shot for Dartmouth and Cornell ED (or EA, I’m not quite sure which it is). On the other hand - you talk about a lot of things in your resume that are tentative and will occur this coming fall, so maybe consider not applying ED for any schools. Your resume may be much stronger by the time RD application rolls around.
Either way, you’re a competitive applicant. Good luck.

9

@emmahuang I’m actually an upcoming junior, so I’ll be applying in the 2022 cycle. I will strongly consider ED to those two schools, although the thing throwing me off is the idea of potentially getting into MIT. Not sure if most MIT applicants apply to an ED school or not if MIT is their top choice.

10

Have you considered the Urban Studies major at MIT? It seems like a great fit for you.

11

Are your parents divorced or separated?

If so, read http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/2083835-faq-divorced-parents-financial-aid-and-net-price-calculators.html .

12

@penguin2 I will look into it! I’m not sure how much it ties into CS, will have to dive deeper.

@ucbalumnus They are not separated. One of my parents doesn’t work for ethical reasons. They may find a job soon, however.

13

Contact the MIT coach sooner rather than later. The only thing to keep in mind is that the coach’s input has very little sway with admissions.

Your geography will be of interest to some college admissions committees. They generally like to take a few students from each state. Your scores and stats are top notch. Apart from the local kids at Exeter, you will probably be one of the top most kids in the entire state of NH. So this means that applying to Dartmouth will dilute your geographic mini-hook.

Applying to schools farther away, and with fewer NH applicants, will greatly help you, especially if you apply binding ED.

14

@sgopal2 Thank you for this tip. I will be contacting the coach after my junior season.

It has never really occurred to me that living in such a small state would make a difference. I actually go to the public school in the same town as Phillips Exeter—I did this because competition there is too fierce and I have no trouble standing out at a public. Hopefully colleges won’t confuse the two schools lol.

Any recommendations on schools further away with fewer NH applicants that have strong STEM programs? I’m quite interested in Columbia. Visited Northwestern last summer but their CS isn’t the greatest.

15

No colleges will confuse the two.

My read is that so far you are on track for a good probability of success with an ED application at places like CMU CS, Dartmouth, Cornell, Brown, and Penn. Columbia and Duke would be more of a stretch. The HYPSM colleges would be risky.

But it’s still early, and you have another 18 months before your applications are complete. Be sure to keep us appraised of what else you accomplish by then.

16

Here are some schools which are strong in CS: Stanford, UC Berkley, Caltech, UIUC, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, Waterloo, Michigan, UT Austin.

Columbia has CS in both SEAS and Columbia College. Both are difficult to get accepted, but slightly easier in SEAS. Columbia also has binding ED.

17

https://www.ivyachievement.com/computer-science-rankings/

I just came across this. Now I’m seriously rethinking my choices and considering going top heavy…thoughts?

18

So long as you have a safety which you would be happy to attend, and you can afford the cost of applications, and the time to put an essays, you may as well.

However, if cost is an issue, UIUC, while a top CS school, is also notoriously stingy in aid. Also, there is no benefit for you in attending their CS+Geography program over attending a “lower ranked” CS program in a different college.

You are a strong applicant for any college, and you should definitely apply ED to your favorite choice which you could afford.

Looking at that scattergram, I would not take it seriously. First of all, IPEDS only gives the median income of low SES students. At colleges like Harvard with smaller and newer CS programs, which also have very few low SES students attending these programs, the median income is meaningless as an indication of whether you will end up with this type of income or not.

Using LinkedIn as an indication of employment is ridiculous, since it assumes that all CS graduates will have an active LinkedIn account once they start working, and that there is no difference between colleges in the rate of use of LinkedIn by their graduates. It also ignores the very large number of CS graduates who have their own successful startup companies, since the article makes the stupid choice to only count those “reporting CS-related positions in top companies”.

Moreover, they determined “top companies” based on the rankings of other people, which are dubious at the best. Basically, it is presenting a bad analysis which is using the questionable results of other bad analyses as data. The fact that they have MIT with such a low placement rate really demonstrates that it is a case of GIGO.

So ignore the article, it is not providing you with reliable information.

19

I agree with @MWolf that the Ivy Achievement article is really bad.

Their search criteria looked for people who worked in the San Francisco Bay Area at a number of well known firms, such as Apple, Microsoft, Sales Force, Google, etc.

Here is the main problem with that search: some of the most talented software people don’t work for these companies. They will instead be working on a startup that they hope will make it big, or they will be working for hedge funds on the East Coast for really big money. A lot of these kids come from places like MIT, or Harvard, or Michigan, which is why they are under-ranked relative to what you would expect.

20

@MWolf @hebegebe That’s good to know. Rankings are always confusing and hard to trust. I probably should look for fit and try to visit, but with all this COVID stuff going on it’s quite hard (managed to visit UIUC, Wisconsin, Michigan, CMU, and NU last summer as I was in the Midwest for something else) Cost is not an issue for me, and in the case that I get rejected to all my schools, I can always attend UNH on a scholarship or take a gap year. At this point, my main concern is time. I have no perception of how long each application takes.

I’m quite a perfectionist in that I will spend a lot of time making sure what I do is as high quality as it can be—with this work ethic in mind, how time consuming will college apps be if I apply to, say, 15-20 schools? Would I have to sacrifice quality? And do essay prompts between schools have overlap? Obviously applying to that many schools isn’t the best idea but I want a rough estimate.

Let’s assume I start in the summer just as portals open, and I would be applying to quite a few EA schools. Soccer season is always very hectic for me, begins in mid-August and ends late October/early November. My senior year courseload will also be quite rigorous.

Edit: By the way, I sifted through my schools’ Naviance today and yesterday. Our acceptance rates to top universities are horrid. Of the 110 applicants since 2010 who have applied to MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, Yale, USC, Stanford, and Northwestern, a total of zero have gotten in. The two top schools we send the most kids to are Dartmouth and Cornell—of the 112 applicants since 2010, 10 have been accepted. Most other top schools have around 2 acceptances out of 30 applicants.

However, I don’t think my school has ever seen someone as motivated as I am. Maybe I can make something happen.