Chance me! Boston private school girl with good ecs and meh grades [3.85 UW, 1580 SAT]

Chance Me / Match Me
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chance me- rising senior!!

Please be brutally honest!

Demographics: East asian, female, upper middle class, legacy at Rutgers, private school in Boston area

Gpa: take the most rigorous course load, uw gpa of 3.85 (which would barely place me in the top 30% of my school)

SAT: 1580

EC’s and awards (strongest part of my application)

  1. national nonprofit for climate change (biggest EC, has received lots of media attention and is a defining part of my life)
  2. literary magazine internship and publications
  3. school newspaper head editor
  4. varsity fencing captain
  5. president of robotics team
  6. internship at government agency
  7. president of school research journal
  8. member of varsity softball
  9. IYWP summer internship
  10. president of school science club

Can’t list my awards due to transparency reasons but they are all related to my nonprofit and are on the national/international level

Teacher recs+essays- I think are strong but idrk

Schools:
Stanford

Harvard

Yale

Princeton

columbia

Brown

UPenn

Duke

vandy

Northwestern

cornell

Dartmouth

georgetown

UChicago

Wash u

JHU

Rice

Williams

Emory

barnard

colgate

swarthmore

amherst

UC berkley

haverford

UND

UMich

Tufts

NYU

USC

UNC

BC

UVA

tulane

villinova

BU

CWRU

northeastern

brandeis

lehigh

Uni of Rochester

Rutgers

GWU

Fordham

Purdue

Syracuse

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This is WAY too many schools!!

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U go to a private so your counselor is the go to person.

In general, being in the 30% range at a school where 90%+ are in the top 10% isn’t good.

But your school might not be the norm. Hence see where others like you end up via speaking to your counselor.

And yes it’s far too many schools but I do suspect you have multiple acceptances on the lower end of your list - all fine schools.

What major ?

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One of the very good things about most private high schools is they have very fine college counselors. Please talk to the person at your school. They will have a very very good sense of where students from your school get into college. Students with similar stats to yours.

I will say…you have way too many schools on your list right now. Plus you have a very reach heavy list. The reach schools really can’t be a guarantee for anyone and applying to more sometimes isn’t better.

Look at the qualities you want in a college, and please try to reduce that list of reach schools.

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Too many schools for sure. Most are big reaches but the last 6 on your list will likely result in some admits.

The rest of your list are all reaches. Some of your “tier 2” reaches are potentially very attainable if you were to decide to ED…but only do that for a first choice school that you can afford.

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Okay so you have too many schools of different culture. For example, I see USC and Williams. One is HUGE and in a city. One is TINY and in the middle of no where. What do you want from your college experience?

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Do you have any budget restrictions? Are you and your parents okay with paying something like $400,000 over four years without taking on any debt?

What is your intended major or possible majors?

What do you want in a university? For all of your reach schools, which ones would be the best fit for you, and why?

What do U of Michigan, UC Berkeley, USC, Dartmouth College, Williams, and Amherst College have in common, other than ranking?

Are you in-state in Massachusetts, New Jersey, or somewhere else?

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What do you want from your college experience? What kind of environment, setting and size appeals to you?

Are there cost constraints? Have you discussed a budget with your parents?

What do you hope to study? It’s fine to be undecided, of course, but not every school will have ABET-certified engineering, or business, or nursing, etc.

Is there a region of the country you might prefer? Climate?

Do you like the city, the country or the ‘burbs?

Does easy access to transportation home matter to you, how far from home do you really want to be?

Do you want a small school, a big school, or something in between?

Do you prefer a “rah-rah,” highly spirited place, or something more low-key and studious?

Do you care about Greek life?

Are there particular clubs or activities you wish to engage with?

Does it matter if the school is religiously affiliated?

Do you want a campus that is politically active?

Does the diversity of the student body matter to you?

What about housing and food?

As others have noted, you likely have access to very strong college advising resources. Use them. They may have (already?) provided you with a questionnaire with some criteria for you to consider. They will also be able to stratify your list based on the matriculation of previous graduates.

Visit some schools — it shouldn’t be difficult, based on where you’re located. Get a feel for what resonates with you.

You need to reflect on who you are and where you will be happiest. Your current, overlong list is random and too heavy with the big, most-selective names. It’s OK to have reaches, it’s just that there’s not much rhyme or reason to this list.

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thank you for your honesty :slight_smile:

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okay, thank you for letting me know- I will reach out.

I am planning on a sociology major, but I am kind of undecided.

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The too many schools is more about your time resources. These schools have essays. Some multiple so it’ll burn you out or take too much focus from your day to day life. I wouldn’t take it as a criticism.

Some kids apply to one. Some 6-10. Maybe some even 15, 20 or 20+ but I think kids get burned out later.

You really need to decide what you want in a school. Syracuse and Swat, for example, little similarity.

So find what you want in a school, in a campus. Maybe a Wooster with its research focus, would be a Swat safety sub, as an example. Or Denver a Syracuse safety sub.

So once you figure what you want in a school, then you can construct a list.

High ranked, ie well known schools just for prestige sake,is not a good way to build. Once you step foot on campus, you will be there day after day for four years, so you want it to be the right school for you.

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This can be studied at tons of colleges.

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Some of your likely schools may yield protect you. Be sure to show lots of love if you want to have Syracuse and GWU as options. Also for Tulane, it’s a reach because of low admission rate overall (unless you ED) and they love demonstrated interest.

Definitely spend more time figuring out what you want though.

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As you are at a private high school, the first thing to do is (as other posters have mentioned) to sit down with your guidance counselor – probably on multiple occasions – and discuss what your chances are at the schools that you have listed. A GC, especially one with some tenure at your school, will have an idea about the success rate that your school has in placing students at various colleges and universities. Also, if your high school has Naviance or some other similar software program, then you could use that to see how students from your school do in admissions at your schools of interest.

Another thing that you might do is to look at the Common Data Sets for the schools in which you are interested; specifically at Section C7 and Sections C9-C11. Section C7 tells you how a given college or university weighs both academic and non-academic admissions factors; so if you have concerns about your high school GPA, then you might focus on those schools that give more weight to standardized test scores than to GPA. Sections C9-C11 give objective data about matriculated students, so you can compare your test scores and GPA with those of matriculated students – which may help in giving you a crude estimate about your admissions chances.

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I will confess to being a little concerned with where you are in the process as a rising Senior in June. The independent schools I am familiar with typically require a narrowed list of colleges at the completion of junior year. The college advising office will then rank the list for likely, target and reach (or even “low reach” and “high reach,” or “target” and “high target”).

There will have also been multiple meetings and info sessions by now, both one-on-one and with the parents. Access to Naviance or Scoir scattergrams for the school would have been granted, and a questionnaire on student preferences would have been collected months ago.

What resources and supports are available to you? Have any of the steps I’ve described taken place?

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There are plenty of students from public high schools who have had none of that but can still be successful getting into college.

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Here is my dose of brutal honesty: This list does not look like the list of a rising senior who can be admitted to many of these kinds of schools. This is the kind of aspirational list that I would expect from a motivated but unfocused freshman or sophomore.

I think you will be able to get into some of the schools on your list, but the list is currently 40+ schools long. As a rising senior, you need to become MUCH more realistic, thoughtful, strategic, and introspective than what this list represents. You need to figure out what you want to do. You say that you have won national and international awards for your EC. I work with students who have had similar success and acclaim, and they are usually able to articulate how that EC translates into an academic interest. They aren’t “kind of undecided.” They know they can change down the road, but most students who have enough passion and momentum to win big awards want to either continue the work in college or have ideas on how that activity will propel them into a certain academic direction.

In that vein, the biggest problem with your list isn’t simply that it is too long and that writing all of the essays could be impossible. Peeling a layer back, what a list this long and diverse is revealing is that you don’t have an academic focus. You don’t know what you want or how you would fit at various colleges, and that lack of insight is going to make it incredibly difficult for you to position yourself through your application to any college.

Remember that first and foremost, colleges are looking for students who will thrive academically. You are below the top quartile for your class, which might not be a big issue depending on the high school, but coming from most high schools it could be a red flag for a lot of these schools. Another concern is that you are not confident in your teacher recommendations. Perhaps you are being modest, but the schools on your list are going to be expecting testimonies to your intellectual curiosity and academic strength. Although you aren’t a top student, an AO will expect to read things from a science teacher like, “Student often stays after class to ask questions about the latest scientific research into climate change,” or from a history teacher something like, “Student had so much to share and add to the class after an ‘internship at government agency’ and really helped her classmates understand previously abstract ideas.”

As others have said, you should be working with your school’s college counselor. He or she should have specific insight on whether or not your high school tends to be a feeder school to any colleges on your list, or if there are some that seem to not take your HS’s graduates. If your high school utilizes Naviance or SCOIR or similar, you can get an idea of whether or not students with your GPA from your high school are being admitted to the universities on your list.

If everything you have reported is accurate, you can be an interesting candidate at many schools. You need to put in some work to be thoughtful about the application process, though, so that you aren’t throwing up a bunch of things just to see what sticks. You need to do this not only to increase the number of schools to which you are admitted, but also to make sure those schools will be the right ones for you.

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For sure, but my shared concern with @Metawampe is that – if this poster is genuine – she seems to be rather disconnected from the services of a typical private school. If that’s the case and she doesn’t understand what is available to her, it might by a symptom of a bigger problem for the student. I don’t know many affluent, east coast, private school students who would have such an unwieldy list at this point in the process, so the fact that this is where she is indicates a disconnect, either with the school, the family, or the student.

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Of course, no question.

But if this student is resourced under the typical private school model, her search should be much more focused and well informed by now. Something is not adding up.

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And I’d feel the same if this was a public school student, many of whom have to dig in and do research in their own. My kids had zero help from their school, and my youngest were more prepared than the oldest ones.

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