Chance a VA resident for UC's, Ivys, Stanford [3.81 GPA, 1560 SAT, computer engineering]

Chance Me / Match Me
21

For perspective re: Virginia Tech - we live in NoVa, and attend a competitive highschool. My son graduated in 2022 and applied to a number of engineering schools, including Virginia Tech.

His application stats:

  • Every class for HS credit was an A. This included all honors courses and AP Physics C, AP BC Calc, APUSH, APLatin, APHUG, APEnglish Lit, AP English Lang, AP Comp Sci. He also had three years of engineering classes, including a capstone course with a project that was patent pending. (I can’t remember his weighted GPA, but unweighted was a 4.0)
  • He was captain of the varsity crew team
  • He was an Eagle Scout with hundreds of volunteer hours.
  • He had school wide awards and I would guess stellar recommendations
  • His SAT was 1540 and ACT was a 35.
  • He got 5s on every AP Exam (except APLit, but we didn’t know that at the time of application, and he got a 4 there)

He was waitlisted at Virginia Tech.

We are Virginia residents.

He got in to engineering programs, and honors colleges if they had them, at every other school to which he applied. This included Purdue, Case Western, Lehigh, RPI, Pitt and WPI and he got significant merit aid at all but one of those.

Again, waitlisted for our in state engineering program. He had done demonstrated interest at Virginia Tech - did multiple virtual events during COVID shutdown time and an in person tour as soon as they opened up. He’s a strong writer and I believe his essays were good.

The best we can figure is that maybe they thought it was yield protection, that he was using them as a safety and wasn’t really interested. His best friend, also a VA resident, was also applying for engineering and was waitlisted - but got in to MIT, Michigan, Cal Tech and other, arguably appreciably better, engineering schools. Which added to our thought process about yield protection.

All that to say I don’t think anyone should consider engineering at Virginia Tech a safety. I think the way they look at applications is just different. It doesn’t mean you won’t get in - you are clearly a very strong student and candidate. But just make sure you have other safeties too, because they are definitely different.

As it turns out, my kid wasn’t upset to be waitlisted. He had decided by then that Tech was probably a bigger school than he wanted. Who knows, maybe they somehow intuited that.

He ended up at WPI and has loved it. If you’d like to hear more about WPI I’d be happy to sing its praises, I think it’s a great program that doesn’t get all the love it deserves.

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22

Virginia Tech in-state engineering is extraordinarily competitive, as you highlight. They swear they don’t yield protect (and the former employees/connected counselors where I work believe them) - it just really is that hard. It is MUCH easier to be admitted to other majors and colleges there, so it always feels off when someone is waitlisted with really strong scores and others glide in with non-stellar stats.
The most confusing part about VT admissions is that it’s easier to get in as an out of state applicant than an in-state applicant (in-state yield is really strong and OOS yield is low).

VT Is really transparent with overall admissions data if anyone wants to look - https://udc.vt.edu/irdata/data/students/admission/index#college

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23

OP - one other thing that caught my eye - you mentioned that some of your lower grades were from middle school. You may be able to take those off your transcript if you don’t otherwise need them. I know our VA HS allows for this. The catch, though, is that if you need for example an 8th grade foreign language to meet a college’s foreign language requirement, then you wouldn’t want to do that. But if you don’t have anything like that, talk to your guidance counselor and see if it’s a possibility and if they think it’s a good idea. Of course, I also think that a few Bs in 8th grade aren’t the end of the world - especially since you’ve shown such growth and improvement since then, and I think, if anything, the improvement in grades shows how you’ve grown as a student. I just wanted to put the idea out there in case it was of interest to you.

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