<p>Ethnicity: Asian/Chinese (First Generation)
Languages: English (Fluent) Chinese (Day-to-Day) Spanish (Basic)</p>
<p>School: Southern California. Top 200 public school in the U.S.
Rank: School does not publicly disclose.
GPA (9-11): 4.0 (UW) 4.4 (W, taken total 8 APs)
GPA (10-11) 4.0 (UW) 4.6 (W, 8 APs)</p>
<p>SAT: 2270 (Oct 1 2011) CR: 690 Math: 800 Writing: 780 Not planning to retake.
SAT II: Math IIc: 800 Biology: 800</p>
<p>AP Scores
World History: 5
Spanish: 4
English Language and Composition: 5
Physics B: 5
Biology: 5
Psychology: 5
US History: 4
Calc AB: 5</p>
<p>Honors
English 10 Honors
Algebra II/Trig Honors
AP World History
AP Spanish
AP English Language and Composition
AP Biology
AP Physics
AP Calc AB
AP Psychology
AP US History</p>
<p>Community Service: ~80 hours
Work: Summer of Junior year, 2 jobs. Both paid (one of which is an internship)</p>
<p>Senior Year:
AP Literature
AP Physics C
AP Gov/Econ
Calc CD
AP Computer Science
AP European History</p>
<p>Your stats are certainly good enough. First generation helps. Are you male or female? If you’re female, that’s an even bigger boost.</p>
<p>Only weak part I see are your ECs–unless you’re leaving anything out or not going into enough detail, they will hurt your app. Other than schoolwork I don’t see anything about math or comp sci - how do you know you’re interested in majoring in CS? (There was an essay on this when I applied)</p>
<p>I would probably say it’s a low reach considering only the information you provided.</p>
<p>As for what questions they ask: for the alumni interviews, it’s pretty much their choice, so I’d say just the usual stuff haha. My CMU interview was one of my worst, so I’m thinking that it doesn’t matter too much as long as you do it.</p>
<p>Well your academics are certainly up to par SCS wise but your EC’s are weak. Internship is nice but that’s about it. SCS will most likely be a low-mid reach for you, higher if early decision.</p>
<p>I feel that I should know this, but what does low/mid/high reach mean?</p>
<p>@jogo84: I’m 100% sure I want to apply to SCS. My dad is a CS major (masters) and I’m excited with the direction of CS going forward in the future. Barring procrastination, I’m aiming to take CS101 through Udacity and learn start learning a language by the end of this semester. </p>
<p>@cortana431: I think I’m going to apply early for CMU. Is there a difference between ED1 and ED2?</p>
<p>I have some other EC, but they are far and few.
~18 hours Library volunteering
1 year CSF (not holding office)
10 hours volunteering for track event
~30 hours for soccer volunteering</p>
<p>Thanks very much guys (girls if you happen to be females)</p>
<p>The one great thing about ED1 is that you get your decision back by mid-December. And if you get accepted you will not need to apply to other colleges, whose deadlines are generally around January 1st (ED2’s decision doesn’t come out until after the first of the year). If you get accepted ED1 you get to have an awesome December break, instead of writing more essays, submitting more applications, and spending more money on application fees, SAT score submissions, etc. etc. But from CMU’s perspective, I believe there is no difference between the two.</p>
<p>Are you going to apply for financial aid? Have you tried CMU’s financial aid calculator and see if your family can afford to send you to CMU without taking on too much debt? I’m pretty sure that if you apply early decision and get accepted you don’t receive your financial aid package until March/April like the RD applicants and as an ED applicant you have to withdraw applications from other colleges (but you should check up on that).</p>
<p>Reach means that you are unlikely to get accepted to a college but it is still very well possible. High reach means that your academic stats are well below a school’s averages and low reach means that your stats are at or well above a school’s averages. (stats being SAT score/GPA/class rank).</p>
<p>Your stats are very good and I don’t think they’ll be the reason for a rejection or waitlist. As others have noted, your extracurriculars seem rather weak. Is your internship related to CS (e.g. software/web development/robotics)? That will definitely help.</p>
<p>Part of it may be framing your ECs appropriately: describe more what you do as a study buddy, for example, and connect to how you’re giving back to your community or teaching a subject you love (while also reinforcing your knowledge in it).</p>
<p>If possible, you could emphasize your responsibility and investigative/self-learning nature. If you’re learning CS on your own or taking online courses for fun, this might be a good thing to talk about to an interviewer or in your essays! Also, if you do things like USACO (online programming competition—highly recommend doing this, it’s fun!), or make a website or app for fun, it’s totally legitimate to put this under extracurriculars on your app. I did that for a writing competition (<a href=“NaNoWriMo)—if%5B/url%5D”>NaNoWriMo)—if</a> you check it out, it’s not really your traditional EC (especially since it isn’t easily verifiable by a third party), but was important to me and gave a sense of who I was as an applicant.</p>
<p>As a side note: anecdotal evidence from my fellow freshmen (I’m a rising sophomore doing CS@CMU) suggests that ED admits get very little financial aid. Many of the regular decision students I know got reasonable to generous amounts.</p>
<p>^ I actually thought that CMU gave better aid to ED admits. This is also only from anecdotal evidence though.</p>
<p>I think you have decent chances, but like the others said, you don’t have many ECs.</p>
<p>I don’t think the interview matters much. I thought that I completely bombed the interview, but I still got in SCS. That said, I did prepare a fair number of questions, so the interviewer probably thought that I was very interested in SCS. The questions were very general, but I didn’t prepare at all. so I paused a lot. If you can talk about your ECs and interests without pausing all the time, you should be fine with the interview.</p>
<p>^ I guess we’ll never know. Anecdotal evidence also either goes “CMU is surprisingly generous with financial aid!” to “CMU is stingy!” (more on the latter than the former)…it’d be interesting to have stats on average aid given to CS admits for early v. regular, but it doesn’t get released, I think.</p>
<p>I’d agree the interview isn’t something to stress over too much. Come prepared with questions on CMU’s culture (e.g. how Carnival works, buggy, booth, or more general activities) and specific questions about CS. Hopefully your interviewer will have some familiarity with SCS—but the culture questions are a good fallback if not.</p>
<p>Also, don’t talk over the interviewer too much, and asking questions about his/her CMU experience is friendly, polite, and potentially useful information too. Ask what he/she liked the least and most.</p>
<p>Eh, unfortunately my internship isn’t related to CS or programming. I initially had a greater propensity towards business and UPenn, but the internship and meeting people in the field really turned me away from it. </p>
<p>I’m trying to get into CS with online classes and stuff, but I don’t think I will have the time to accomplish anything worthwhile by the time I submit my application. </p>
<p>And to the last two posters: Would either of you be willing to meet up with me on campus when I visit in mid-August? I’ve never been there before (or anywhere in Pennsylvania heh). And I would like to think that I have a decent personality, if that counts for anything.</p>