Small public school, transferred last year from larger public government school
Gender: Male
Race/ethnicity: South Asian
Intended Majors: Engineering (either computer, chemical or aerospace), CS and Data science
GPA, Rank, and Test Scores
No GPA, percentages instead(so far): 9th grade: 1st Term: 76%, Finals: 80%
10th grade: 1st Term: 81%, Finals: 92%
Note that my curriculum is tough and my school had a lot of grade deflation, so please judge my grades according to my education system and course work (next section) (most people know this but I still wanted to include it
School rank: 10th grade finals: 10th in class (out of 200 students)
SAT: not taken yet
Awards
Extracurriculars
*1) School band section leader, 6 years - performed
in school and for events in and outside of school, hoping to get an LOR next year from one of my teachers in band (he has known me for a longer time than any of my other teachers, and the school band, while it is a mid EC by T20/50 standards, it fits very nicely into my personal story I’m planning to write and character)
NCC cadet for 3 years, graduated with an A grade
did geopolitical study (didn’t get to do any cool activities like marching, rifle training or horseback riding because of covid)
School choir for 2 years, sung in competitions
and helped win an interschool choir competition.
Fluent in HTML, CSS, learning C++, Python and JS, mostly self taught from online courses and videos
Fluent in English, 2 Indian languages and conversational
in German, learning Portuguese and Latin.
Conlanging and worldbuilding: building and constantly developing 2 fictional
languages using AI tools and studying linguistics, the languages are part of
a fictional alternate history world.
Computer Science class admin: Help Comp sci teacher in class,
send students notes and explanations and assignments, manage our class group online and help students while programming.
Guitarist: 6 years, took and passed the Trinity College of London’s grade 1 and 3 exams
Writer for my school magazine: Wrote pieces in english about talking about the importance of scientific literacy and correlating decreased scientific literacy it to medical skepticism in internet media during Covid - 19.
Also wrote a piece in German talking about dialects in Germanic language speaking nations, and the various forms that the German language has taken in different regions.
Essays/LORs/Other
Junior so none yet, but planned 3 LORS, one from my CS teacher, one from my German teacher and one from my band teacher, who have all liked me in their classes and outside, hopefully very strong because I have a great connection with all these teachers.
Cost Constraints / Budget
Max. EFC: 15 - 20k per year
Schools
Safety * - ASU, RIT Match I dont know what my matches are exactly, so I am listing some schools which I like with (generally) higher acceptance rates
Purdue, UW Madison, Colorado School of Mines, U Rochester, Bucknell U, CU Boulder
Reaches - MIT(MIT is an extreme reach as they accept like 5 students from my country but I still want to try for MIT), Cornell, Yale, Tufts, UC Berkeley, Bowdoin College
Also please give me some more matches according to my stats and EFC
The vast majority of us here are unfamiliar with foreign grading systems, so please provide us context: are you at the top, or very near the top of your class? Your region? Your country?
Your intended majors are among the most competitive to get into. As an international student seeking substantial financial aid, there are no safeties.
You will need to eliminate all the public schools on your list as they will not provide you need based aid. ASU does provide merit scholarships to international students but I don’t know if it’ll be enough to meet your budget. Maybe @tsbna44 can weigh in.
The only schools that will meet your full need are the super reaches like MIT and Yale. These are all very hard to get into even for students with perfect stats. They look for a lot more beyond stats, and unfortunately your ECs don’t stand out.
There are lower tier schools that may provide merit money (but hard to gauge that without knowing your academic strength or SAT/ACT score).
Any particular reason you’re looking for LACs? They typically don’t have engineering schools and aren’t particularly strong for CS. Bowdoin for example.
Do you have an affordable safety school in your home country?
You have a few things listed as having done them for 6 years. In most cases, colleges here will only want to know what you did during high school not before. So…
You mention getting a LOR from a music teacher. Most colleges here want two LORs from academic teachers one STEM and one Humanities (you seem to have those). Your music teacher would be a supplemental LOR and some schools allow these and others do not.
Because of your limited budget, most of the colleges on your list will be unaffordable.
The international acceptance rate for some of your schools is less than 5%. And for some of your other colleges, they are need aware meaning that your level of financial need could be considered when your application is considered.
I hope you are looking at affordable colleges in your home country as well. I think you need to.
Context for grading sytem: I am near the top of my class in my school, even though my grades seem low by US standards. For extra context I am in a small public school in my India which follows the state curriculum (HSC)
The LAC’s which are on my list have appealed to me while researching US colleges online, Bowdoin for example isn’t known for CS, but the college really appealed to me for its atmosphere, campus and I really just like the college.
I should also mention that I am primarily focused on colleges in my home country (I am preparing to take the JEE and my states CET entrance exams for engineering colleges in India) however, I’m also applying to US colleges as well so I can have more options.
Hope this explains some of the stuff I forgot to touch on in the post.
I should have mentioned this in the post, but I am preparing to take a few engineering college emtrance exams in my country, and applying to US colleges on the side as well.
I am aware that my EC’s are quite lackluster at the moment (for some of the more competitive universities on my list anyway). However I do have another year before I apply and I plan to do atleast 1 high impact EC.
I think you are wise to focus on preparations to gain admission to the very fine colleges in your country.
It doesn’t hurt to add a few US colleges into the mix (preferably ones that that meet financial need for international students) but the odds of acceptance and affordability aren’t high.
Although you may have academic safeties or matches in the US, none of them are likely to be affordable - and therefore it would be a waste of your time and money to apply.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the schools that can provide you sufficient financial aid (like MIT or Yale) are also extraordinarily difficult to get into, and unfortunately your profile suggests an extremely low chance of success.
You have several excellent engineering schools in India (I know because my firm’s India locations recruit there). The most realistic option might be for you to get accepted at one of these top schools and complete your undergraduate studies there. Later, if studying in the US is still of interest, you can apply to a graduate program. That will be much more achievable.
