Chance a 3.7 UW African-American Studies Black Florida Girl [FL resident, middle class, <$15k]

Chance Me / Match Me
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Demographics: First Gen Haitian Black girl from FL, Title 1 School

Major: African American Studies, Minor in Econ

Testing: trying to get better score, test optional for now

Academic Background: 3.7 uw GPA, 4.2 W, didnt pass 2 AP exams (first time in AP), passed APUSH and Research with 3s. Lots of B’s because of family responsibilities and mental health. My school doesn’t have a lot of ap participation and most people don’t even go onto college.

ECs: (I did my common app descriptons already lol)

  1. Freelance Writing Wrote expository articles and creative writing; created work surrounding social justice, the black community, and . See Additional Info section.
  2. DemocraShe 1 of 50 chosen nationally to receive a $500 stipend engaging in government; taught 100+ girls civics and government; engaged with congresswomen
  3. Youtube Creator Gained 75K+ views; uploaded Nickelodeon lost media; interviewed Grammy & Emmy-winning professionals in entertainment; collaborated w/ others globally
  4. Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop Wrote 25+ pieces in 4 days; chosen as co-Editor-in-Chief of student led anthology & collected 100+ submissions in 2 days; led communication
  5. Discord Server Brought in 240+ members from 3 countries with over 26,780 messages exchanged; introduced international educational opportunities to students globally
  6. Class Council Held position as vice president (10) and class president (11); coordinated multiple fundraisers and had over 10+ students assist in generating $10K+
  7. Air Force JROTC Second Lieutenant officer; Coordinated events for 400+ cadets; led parades with over 5k+ attendees, advanced to drill team Air Force nationals
  8. First Gen Support Assisted in marketing a 3-day virtual college prep series; brought in 900+ first-gen students; had alumni speakers from Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, etc
  9. Success Team Received $500 scholarship for a college access trip to Atlanta (10); recruited 15+ join over 2 years; received various college access opportunities
  10. Drama Performed for 700+ people in four shows over two years; assisted in props and rehearsal while dancing and acting in a cast of 10+

Honors:

  1. Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop Scholarship: Received a full $2575 scholarship to attend, 214/1000+ accepted from 13 countries
  2. Carson Scholar: $1,000 scholarship for community service, only student nominated in school (2,055)
  3. Kelley School of Business Women’s Leadership Institute: 1 of 60 women chosen from 4 countries
  4. Scholastic Art and Writing Silver Key in Personal Memoir: Top 15% of 300,000 submissions nationwide
  5. Yale Women In Economics Semi-Finalist: One of 500 chosen out of 1000+ applications

College list:

Early action

USF (Florida)(Guaranteed program with my school)

UGA (foundation fellow)

UNC Chapel Hill UMICH

Princeton REA…

Regular

Vanderbilt

Duke

WashU (did their flyin, 200/1491 apps accepted!!)

Cornell

UPenn

Notre Dame

Stanford

Rice

Boston University

Boston College

Mainly focused on the chancing :slight_smile:

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Cost constraints / budget?

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Welcome back, @christiania!

Since last time it appears as though some of the changes are that you attended the Kenyon Young Writers workshop on scholarship and received a scholarship for community service, you have a 3.7UW GPA, and you received less than a 3 on Macroecon and Government (as those were listed as APs you were taking this year in addition to APUSH and Resarch). Are there any other changes that I’m missing?

Is the budget still around $15k? Do you have the community service hours you need for Bright Futures? Is your test score high enough for Bright Futures?

These are my guesses as to what your chances might be for admission to the schools on your list:

Extremely Likely (80-99+%)

  • USF (make sure that you meet all the requirements to be guaranteed entry through your high school)

Likely (60-79%)

Toss-Up (40-59%)

Lower Probability (20-39%)

Low Probability (less than 20%)

  • UGA (it’s test required)
  • UNC
  • UMich
  • Princeton
  • Vanderbilt
  • Duke
  • WashU
  • Cornell
  • UPenn
  • Notre Dame
  • Stanford
  • Rice
  • Boston U.
  • Boston College

As you craft your college list I would pay very careful attention to your own personal makeup. How would you feel if you received one acceptance and 19 rejections/waitlists? If getting all of those rejections would fire you up to show how amazing you are at school #20 and what a big loss it was for those other schools, then it’s okay to have a very reach-heavy list (which this list is). Others find that receiving rejection after rejection is really demoralizing and can impact their self-esteem and health. If that’s the case, then I would craft your list accordingly. I find that most people tend to do best if they get more acceptances than rejections/waitlists, but you’re the only one on this forum who knows yourself, but I would think very seriously about this when deciding which schools to apply to.

For ease of reference:

OP’s thread from February:

OP’s thread from March: Match/Chance Me for Liberal Arts! HS Junior, 3.8uw GPA, with a maybe unique spike? [FL resident, need FA]

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One thing that you might want to do is to look at the Common Data Set for each school to which you are considering applying. The CDS contains some information that might be worthwhile looking at as you estimate admissions chances at difference colleges and universities: Section C7 contains a list of academic and non-academic admissions factors, and how each school weighs those factors; Sections C9-C11 contain information about test scores and GPAs for recently matriculated students at each school.

One thing I would pay attention to is how each school weighs the academic and non-academic admissions factors in Section C7, because no two schools are alike. For example, UNC gives more weight to standardized test scores than to GPA; so you would probably need to have really high standardized test scores in order to be competitive at UNC-CH. Notre Dame, by contrast, weighs GPA much higher than standardized test scores; and Notre Dame gives heavy weight to some interesting choices among the non-academic admissions factors that it considers.

Also, some of the schools on your list – U of Michigan comes readily to mind – will recalculate your high school’s GPA by eliminating all plusses and minuses. So, a B+ is considered a B, and A- is considered an A, and so forth.

Also, if you think that you may want to go to a professional school or graduate school after getting your undergraduate degree, then you will need to figure out how to pay for that as well. So minimizing your COA at an undergraduate institution might take on more importance for you.

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$15k

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You remember me :sweat_smile::sweat_smile: and I don’t mind getting certain rejections. If they didn’t want me, that’s fine!
I’m close (4 hours off) for the bright futures
Studying for the SAT to get higher for bright futures
I actually dropped Macro and I’m taking Economics through dual enrollment, and I didn’t take the Exam for Econ.

I’m suprised you remember all that :sob:

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You’re very helpful! Thank you!

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Well, your username and description of yourself rang some bells, and I found your old threads to refresh on the details :wink: .

Do you have any other schools that you’re considering besides the ones in your initial post of this thread? If so, what are they?

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Swarthmore, Willams, Bowdoin, Pomona, and Amherst. I applied to their flyins. And strangely I didn’t add that I did the WashU fly in, and they told us that 200/1491 applications were accepted

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You sound like an absolutely amazing candidate, but your list is SO reach heavy. Which is fine as long you would be happy to attend USF, but perhaps you want to explore some more targets or safeties. I do think you stand a chance at a reach because of our ECs, but I think you’d stand a better chance with some good AP or ACT scores to offset your lower than average (for these high reach schools) UW GPA. They won’t hold the lack of rigor against you if courses are unavailable at your school, but they will want to see that you can meet the academic challenge.

Considering your chosen major, have you considered any HBCUs? Do you plan on continuing ROTC? As you picked schools all over the country, I’m assuming you don’t care too much about geography.

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Are you interested in a HBCU?

FAMU would be a good safety for you
and if you can bump up your SAT to 100% Bright Futures you are within budget without any Financial Aid or Merit

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All of these applications will be a LOT of work. Most of the low probability schools on your list (and the additional schools you mentioned in post #9) have multiple additional essays and responses. You might be looking at close to 100 extra essays to write. Will you be able to write strong, individualized essays customized to each prompt? Most students plan to apply to far fewer low probability schools than you and still end up eliminating schools because they get burned out. And if you end up needing to scrape something together for your essays, you’re unlikely to end up with an offer of admission.

It’s great that you were accepted to WashU’s fly-in program! That might be a good way to help eliminate schools from your list. If you apply for a fly-in program and aren’t accepted, then you might interpret that as the odds not being very favorable for an admission when there are even more applicants to compete against.

Have you thought about applying to Kenyon? It’s a very strong school and generous in calculating financial aid and has already given you a scholarship for their summer program. Plus, it’s not quite as big of a reach as the other schools you’re thinking of.

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Students interested in HBCUs can apply to 66 of them for one $20 fee with the CBCA. However, not all HBCUs are on the CBCA (e.g. FAMU is not, and neither are Howard, Spelman, or Tuskegee).

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Not interested in HBCUS, and I visited FAMU a last winter break. Great campus! Not my vibe

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I’m at Kenyon still right now, and I absolutely hate it :slight_smile: but I do understand that their financial aid is very great. I also have previous essays I wrote for summer programs (Stanford SSHI, Princeton PSJP, Hamilton Scholars Finalist, Kenyon Writers, etc etc) so I’d mostly have to tweak them to make them college level, but otherwise I see the point. I’m trying to see which schools have similar prompts so I could instead reuse them, and if not, set it aside.

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I’m sorry you’re hating it!

Right now I am wondering about something, and hope you’ll really think seriously about the answer. How would you feel if come March of next year you only have one acceptance, and it’s to USF? If you would happily enroll, looking forward to spending four years there with no ill-effects from all of the rejections, then your list is fine. But if you would be disappointed, or trying to find other options at the last minute, or trying to figure out how quickly you could race through USF because you really don’t want to go and didn’t think that would end up as your only option…if you would be any of those things, I would strongly urge you to add additional schools to your list that have likelier odds of admission.

I know you said you were primarily interested in chancing info, but if you need help brainstorming additional possibilities, let us know. From what I recall, you were hoping for a school with at least 5k undergrads, a racially diverse student body with a definite proportion of that population being black, located in a city, and it needs to meet a $15k budget. With that tight of a budget, you might not get everything you want. Which items are you more willing to compromise on? Also, does that $15k budget include federal loans (max of $5500 your first year…max of about $28k total for undergrad)?

And in a previous thread (before you disclosed your budget) you said this:

Swarthmore is loan free (source) so that $19k should not have included a loan. If your family can pay $15k, then you’d be able to take a loan out to cover the remainder (i.e. the remaining $4k).

Make sure your family runs the NPCs at all the schools you’re applying to and look at whether or not they include loans in their aid package. If they include loans in the aid package AND the cost is over $15k, those colleges should be eliminated, unless they offer merit aid as well. For your reach schools, I don’t think you would be likely to receive any merit aid, so just look at the NPC for those.

Also, UGA and UMich will not be affordable for you as they don’t provide need-based aid to out-of-state students, I believe. Thus, you can take those two schools off of your list. (UVA and UNC are the only two public colleges in the U.S. that provide need-based aid to out-of-state students.)

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This just adds three more school to your lengthy list of reach schools already listed.

What does this mean? Will you meet the Bright Futures requirements.

I agree…would you like more suggestions of colleges with more likely chances of acceptances?

THIS…you will need to do an amazing job on all of these essays, etc.

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Actually…they are the only two public universities that guarantee to meet full need for all accepted students…including OOS students.

There are a LOT of public colleges that provide need based aid to OOS students, but they don’t guarantee to meet your full need…and it sounds like that’s what you need.

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What do you dislike about Kenyon?

Why not Spelman and Howard?

What about Agnes Scott? It’s urban, diverse, has need based aid, partnership w/GTech.

You definitely need 3-5 matches - colleges where your odds are better than all these reaches. Getting rejected is no fun but rejection After rejection After rejection is absolutely awful. Unbearable. It’s similar to being punched& knocked out once vs. being punched,knocked out, pummeled every day. 14 rejections would be awful but you’d have5-6 acceptances to hold onto.
Considering what you’re aiming for, I’m pretty sure you’d want some place else than USF - deserve actually.
Ofc best case scenario you get into 2reaches and have an embarrassment of riches but… you can’t count on it.:cold_sweat: You really need to have options that are in between USF and HYP.

An absolute academic safety would be University of Iowa - for a double major in AA studies& Writing. Wouldn’t be diverse though large college town, nice campus, automatic admission, Honors, scholarships… Not sure it’d be in-budget.

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Echoing a few other posters here to say that you seem amazing, but that your list is incredibly reach-heavy and a very possible outcome of all of those applications is only one acceptance. I find that a useful exercise is to project out to next May and really try to envision just having that one acceptance at the end of what will be an incredibly time-consuming and stressful application process. Think through how you’ll be feeling if that’s what happens. Every spring some of the regulars on this forum see posts from disappointed seniors with high stats who applied to mostly reaches, and ended up only getting into their safety. In most cases, these students thought they’d be fine with just getting into their safety, but the reality of that outcome was crushing. Don’t be them! Add in multiple targets, and maybe even some lower reaches (all of your reaches are high reaches) to have a more balanced list.

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