Chance Me for T20 Bay Area Stressed Student [3.83 GPA going into 11th grade]

Chance Me / Match Me
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Demographics:

US citizen/permanent resident
State/Location of residency: California
Type of high school (or current college for transfers): Private high school, grade is around 100 kids

Cost Constraints / Budget
I already have a plan for this, don’t worry about it

Intended Major(s): Interested in neuroscience/eng or cs/business, so not entirely sure

GPA, Rank, and Test Scores:
No AP’s or IB’s at my school
UW - 3.83
W - 4.13
My school does differentiate -'s meaning an A- is a 3.7 while an A is 4.0 for uw
Rank - N/A
Self-studied AP Stats and earned a 5

ACT/SAT Scores: Planning to take SAT this summer, first time - 1440

List your HS coursework:

for english, science, and history we don’t get to choose which classes to take for those until senior year or if we want to do honors or non-honors
English: English 9, English 10 H (we don’t get to pick our english)
Math: Pre-calc H
Science: physics, chemistry H
History and social studies:
Language other than English: Spanish 3
Visual or performing arts: dance 2 (2 yrs mandatory arts requirement)
Other academic courses:
speech and debate, CS2 (highest is 4)
college community courses on cs/data science and UCLA course on neuroscience

Awards
all speech and debate:

  • 2x qualifier for (Acronym removed by mod.)
  • top 20 in nation for writing competition
  • N_ _ qualifier
  • top 20 in states for P_ _

Extracurriculars
founder of a mental health startup (2 yrs):

  • 3k users on initial version
  • 14k followers, 50 million impressions
  • published on magazine website (100 million readers/month) and youngest guest on another podcast

speech and debate (2 yr)

  • speech captain
  • founded the speech program and helped to run and set up tournaments to those interested in speech
  • grew the program to around 10 kids in a year (my school is small but hopefully we get more kids)
  • first to attend nietoc (nationals for speech) and nsda (another national circuit) in 100+ yr school history

CS club (1 yr)

  • member for 2 ish years will be leader in my junior year
  • what i’m planning to do:
    • set up hackathons with other schools
    • invite tech focused people to talk during assemblies
    • fundraising to donate tech related products to underprivliedged schools

working for mental health app (2 yr)

  • trained teen advisor
  • live chatted with 600+ teenagers struggling with mental health issues
  • trained to tackle problems from anxiety to s3lf-h@rm and abus3
  • 100+ hours from this

intern for tech company (1 yr)

  • helping to train chatbot (the chatbot basically helps businesses by taking care of their customer calls and other small parts of businesses) that helps over 70k businesses
  • soon in the future i hope to intern and get to do backend work but i’m working on my coding skills for that

YMHA at children’s Institute (1 yr)

  • Collaborated with a team of peers to analyze how childhood trauma can manifest into bipolar disorder, resulting in actionable recommendations for local programs, contributing to improved mental health outcomes by 54% within targets demographic
  • Presented findings to 2,000+ attendees, including students and mental health professionals
  • Presented at the [city where i live] Youth Mental Health Forum

intern for ai mental health company (1 yr)

  • doing it this summer, helping to grow their social media accounts
  • it is paid but idk how a paid internship is valued vs unpaid

director for a program at this mental health NPO (just started this so I’ll explain what I’ll be doing)

  • looking over 18k+ volunteers, 18 chapters
  • planning to grow internationally
  • planning the mental health care kits that get distributed to lower income areas without access to mental health resources
  • looking over partnerships with better help
  • planning the events and taking care of finances

Schools
Looking into T20 schools right now, especially UPenn Wharton but I know that’s a long shot.

I am a rising junior, so I will be strengthening my EC’s that I already have and looking more carefully into schools but any advice would be helpful :slight_smile:

MOD NOTE: some details have been removed.

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You’re a Junior. It’s too early to chance you.

Since you go private, see how kids at your school fare - ask the counselors.

Also when you say don’t worry about $$ - that means you can either afford $100k a year or have need. It’s always a factor so it’s hard to say don’t worry. If you have no need, you have a $50k budget and school costs $100k, then what. So you might be good but make sure you are good.

You’ll need a much higher test score in my opinion.

I can’t tell your academic rigor. It will need to be strong. Your self study AP will likely be zero help. Take classes and do well. Don’t self study.

Keep up the good work and best of luck to you. Talk to you in a year or at least six months.

But honestly, best to talk to your school counselor.

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3.83 is a very good GPA. If you were going to a normal public high school it would be a bit lowish for a “top 20” university. However, whether is it low or just fine for a “top 20” university is likely to depend upon specifics of your high school. At least in my experience university admissions are very good at adjusting for the different grading scales used by different high schools, and we don’t know (and shouldn’t know) your high school.

Since you are at a relatively small private high school, your guidance counselor should be able to guess your chances more accurately than we can.

However, “top 20” universities are a reach for very nearly every student. You also need to make sure that you apply to safeties. For some of us there is a public in-state university that is a solid safety. For most of the rest of us it pays to think carefully regarding which schools to pick to be your safeties. Since you are from California, and California has so many very good public universities, you will want to think some about which would be safeties and which have strong programs in your intended majors and whether you would be happy there.

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Agree. Your counselor may be able to give you the stats for your HS, as well as the stats on the alumni from your school who are attending your choice colleges.

Take your SATs. Hard to know where you stand.
Present what you’ve done, not what you are planning because things happen and change.

Self studying is on your own time. It’s not “considered” too much by the colleges.

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Congratulations on a great record to date! For the first half of high school it is on track for you to have many wonderful acceptances. Try to spend some time investigating schools not in the Top 20. Those are reaches for almost everyone.
The SAT needs to be higher; the GPA is too hard to determine. I know one private school where a 3.83 UW would be close to top 10% and another private where it would be below top 25%. Both schools send less than 10% unhooked to T20, making a 3.83 UW place someone outside the range of a reasonable chance at the second school where that GPA is not top quarter. In other words, you will need to ask your high school what is possible with your gpa at your school, or see if they have SCOIR or naviance.

Question on your courses: does your school have an English 9 H? What about phyics H?
What are the courses you will take next year(11th)?

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If you are interested in undergrad business programs like Wharton, the US News National Universities list isn’t plausibly of value to you, because many of those universities do not have undergrad business programs. And when they do, the relative selectivity, resources, general reputation, and so on of those undergrad programs often varies quite a bit from relative US News rankings.

Personally, I like to direct people to the Poets & Quants school profiles when they are starting out looking at undergrad business programs:

The ranking per se is not that interesting to me, although if you do like to look at rankings, at least this is vastly more on point than the US News National Universities rankings.

Instead, what I really like are the detailed descriptions. You can get an idea of how different programs are structured, what they emphasize, and so on. All potentially very useful if you end up wanting to apply to undergrad business programs.

Then ultimately, you can decide what you are really looking for in your undergrad experience, academically and non-academically, and put together a list of Likely/Foundation, Target/Match, and Reach colleges that are all great fits for you, and where you are also reasonably a good fit for them (aka a two-way fit).

And then there is nothing really to be stressed about. You write applications making your case as to why these are good two-way fits, and then you see what offers you get, and choose your favorite. As long as you did a good job putting together your list in the first place, you basically can’t lose.

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If it is an academically elite one with a significant number of matriculants to the highly selective colleges, your counselor (especially if a dedicated college counselor) should be able to chance you better than anyone here.

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