Decently Competitive Public High School, no hooks
New England area, female
Unweighted GPA: 3.85 (All in A range grades, quite a few A minuses. Only 2 B+’s in APUSH and Spanish junior year semester 2)
Weighted: 4.64/5
SAT: 1560
School doesn’t allow APs until junior year: Took APUSH, Lang, and CS and got a 5,5,4 respectively. Taking BC, Stats, Psych, English Lit Senior year.
ECs:
Interned at Town Department of Health (2yrs); worked with epidemiologist and co-wrote lit. reviewed paper on Tobacco Free generation policy and submitted to board of directors; led to legal vote; awarded $1.5k
Writer/Blogger at Medium + other social media (3yrs): wrote articles about various healthcare policies to better promote literacy amongst teens: reached about 5k views
President/Founder of Non profit (3yrs) : dedicated to making racket sports more accessible in local area and getting rid of cost barriers; free annual clinics for kids (had 50+ local) for underprivileged.
Boys Varsity Tennis Captain(4yrs)
VP of Schools Public Health Club (4yrs) (lowk filler, but had guest speakers + informational meetings)
Healthcare volunteering (2yrs) (50+hours): Talked/Interacted with hospital patients regarding healthcare experience/disparties faced; submitted reports to hospital to improve their data
Part Time job (3yrs) math tutor at Mathnasium, 500+ hours, 200+ Kids from basic math to precalculus
Volunteer at Love for our elders (2yrs) : wrote 100+ letters of kindness and gratitude to elder citizens to help combat senior depression; 60+ documented hours
VP of Science Team (3yrs) (filler, signed team up for sci Olympiad, slideshows, etc.)
Varsity Math Team (4yrs)
Awards:
National US medicine + disease Olympiad Gold medal recipient (top 5% nationally)
HOSA Medical Law + Ethics 3rd place at States (qual for internationals)
Science Olympiad States: top 10 placement for anatomy and physiology
Central State regional Tennis champs
Leukemia Lymphoma Society New England Team Research Pillar Award (fundraised over $15k), our team got research pillar award in 2022
Applying to Cornell Brooks ED as a healthcare policy major. Any tips/advice? Overall last year, 1100 people applied to brooks and they accepted around 130. Do you guys think my fit will overcome my relatively low gpa?
I am not a big fan of applying ED unless two things are both true: (1) The university that you apply ED to is clearly your top choice; (2) Either you are fine with being full pay or the NPC shows the school as likely to be affordable for you.
The fact that you are not sure which university to apply to ED makes me wonder about the first issue. Which of these schools would you rather attend? I will admit that for the two that I am most familiar with I would have trouble deciding between them.
This is very difficult to judge. To me it looks like your grades are good enough for admissions to think that you could handle any of these three schools. Your SAT is superb. Two B+'s are not all that bad, but junior year is an unfortunately time for this to occur. Highly ranked schools in the US, including these three, get way more qualified applicants than they have places for incoming freshman. They are all reaches.
Mostly I think that you need to make sure that you are applying to solid safeties and that you are happy with your safeties. You also need to make sure that your budget fits the schools that you are applying to. For someone who majors in public health a master’s degree is not completely out of question, and you might want to think about whether this would fit your budget. You can do well in public health with a bachelor’s degree from a school that is not ranked in the top 50, or even in the top 100.
Are you sure you’ve calculated your unweighted correctly. 2 B+ is fine. It wouldn’t make a low GPA as you describe it.
All these are reaches. But assuming you can afford them, then ED where you want. ED is not a game. You will spend four years, day after day. And all of these are somewhat similarly rejective.
The B+s are better on our scale 3.3 not 3.0 so depends on ratio
Anyway, beyond UCs I’ve never seen evidence there is a consensus on how colleges do it and we don’t have this kids school profile, which is critical to interpreting GPA anyway..
I generally ignore direct comparison GPAs for top schools as it is apples to oranges and it’s holistic review
Does your official transcript include semester grades? Regardless, I agree these are reaches, but are in the low/mid end of the range. In other words, you just might pull Cornell, and if not, one of the others.
In high school I experimented a lot with public health and healthcare policy as a whole, but in the future I want to keep an open mind to getting into medical school. I have a bunch of safeties I am happy about. I just wanted to know if there is any remote chance for to get into a school like cornell (ed or rd) given that I seem to have everything brooks school of public policy emphasizes (success in english + math courses, genuine interest/experience in public policy, etc.) aside from a mediocre gpa. However I will say that in my the AP + honors math and english courses I have always recived As or higher.
yes, it includes semester grades. Its all in the A-range from freshman year all the way to junor year semester 2, where I have B+ in APUSH & spanish. (poor perfromance q3) I do have a reasonable explanation for this but I understand that it may come off as an excuse. But in my defense that this really impacted me, after I recovered, I earned somewhat strong test scores in the subjects that I “struggled” with (apush got a 5, lang 5, etc.)
For students who are considering medical school as one possible option it is a very good idea to keep an open mind regarding other possible career paths. This sounds like something that you are already doing.
Public health can be combined with other related majors such as nursing or medical school. Again this is a good plan.
Premed classes are tough. They are tough at any “top 100” university, and probably at any “top 200” university. The competition will be very strong at any very good university. At Cornell the competition may be particularly strong in these premed classes. You are not deciding whether to enter Cornell as an average Cornell student versus starting at one of your safeties as an average student. It is more likely that you could be deciding between starting at Cornell as an average student (or possibly slightly below average on GPA) versus starting at a safety perhaps in the top 25% of students. It really is not clear which would improve your chances of getting to medical school, and probably would not make much difference one way or the other.
Which has a stronger public health program might be a very different question.
Medical school is expensive. If you want to keep it open as an option, then make sure that you budget for a full 8 years of university. If you qualify for a lot of need based financial aid, then Cornell might be relatively affordable. If not, then it it unlikely to be your most affordable option. If you are full pay, then between now and the day that they call you “doctor”, it could very well cost over $800,000 and might approach $900,000. You do not want to take even half of this as debt.
Neither daughter was premed. Both however had majors that overlapped a lot with premed classes and knew quite a few premed students (at least two of whom now have an MD). I have heard multiple stories about how tough these classes can be, and how strong many of the premed students are even at a university that is not quite ranked in the top 100 in the US. Let me know if you want to hear a few examples about the rigor of premed classes.
And to me it sounds like you are doing very well, and we are really just hoping to help you think about what might be a good fit for you.