Chance Me: Caltech, MIT, Northwestern, Duke, Tufts, etc.

hebegebe
Sun, 27 Sep 2020 15:39:52 +0000

Let’s recategorize your list into tiers:

High Reach: CalTech, UChicago, Northwestern, Duke, MIT, CMU CS
Reach: Vanderbilt, Cornell, Ga Tech, Georgetown
Match: Tufts, Michigan, CMU (remaining schools)
Likely: Northeastern, BU

Your grades are obviously great, but your AP scores could be an issue for the reaches, particularly the 4 in BC for engineering applicants. You have good activities but nothing that stands out as a particularly strong spike. I think your best chance at a reach school is via ED at Cornell. Fortunately that has an excellent engineering program. Among the match schools, Michigan and CMU are both excellent in terms of engineering.

I do recommend finding more schools in the Match and Likely category and eliminating some from the Reach/High-Reach categories.

Note that Ga Tech is hard to peg in terms of who they admit, which is why I put them as a reach. There are some truly exceptional applicants that get deferred at Ga Tech and others that appear considerably weaker that get accepted there.