South Asian, High Income, Don’t need aid/price not an issue
Demographics:
South Asian
High Income
Live in california (US citizen)
Stats:
GPA: 3.87 UW / ~4.35 W / 4.03 Weighted Capped for UCS (4.5 uncapped) (competitive HS)
Testing: 1520 SAT (760 EBRW, 760 Math)
Coursework: 12 APs by graduation (Calc BC, Physics C, CS A, Stats, etc.)
Circumstances: My grades dropped because I had to become the primary care taker for my Grandma after she had complications with a serious disease (lived with her for past 16 years) which was a lot with my ECs. All bad grades are mostly in English classes, lived in India for 2 years and speak 2 other languages besides English. (was born in the US, moved to india for 2 years while my mom was completing residency and dad was attending classes because they were too busy)
Honors (Probably my weakest aspect besides stats):
OSINT CTF Top 10 Finish (6th place) (Trace Labs international competition) Niche, but rare for high school students, presence in defcon etc.
Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Community Service Award (awarded to an organization I co-directed)
DECA State Finalist
National Merit Commended (Cali cutoff pain)
AP Scholar with Distinction (mid, but listing anyway)
ECs (i think my most decent part):
Founder & Owner – Roblox Game Studio — Scaled studio to 40M+ visits, 8.1K CCU peak, $9–12K monthly revenue. Hired & managed 11 developers, ran ads, handled payroll, built analytics dashboards, filed patent for adaptive game economy system.
Researcher – UCSD — Worked with PhD student mentor using Python + Google Earth Engine to pull AQI data (studying affect of pollution on health; specifically pregnant women but ai model unrelated), trained AI models to analyze pollution trends; created site to help people in areas with bad pollution, accessed by 6K+ users.
Intern – Mid Sized Company (200~ employees) — 1-of-1 high school intern, shadowed product/security teams, significantly helped develop their golden data set for AI threat analysis model, improved results by 15%
Co-Director/Fundraising Manager – Raised $50K over 5 years for charity, choreographed dances, taught scripts, managed volunteers, cold-called donors, personally raised donations by 33% YOY
Founder - Created a tutoring business and hired 5 tutors, 1500+ total hours of tutoring done 600 hours provided for free to underserved students.
Accounting Intern – Managed $100K+/mo invoices, did credit checks, dispute resolution, Walmart/Amazon vendor portals.
President – Data Science Club — Founded first DS club at school, ran ML workshops, taught Pandas/NumPy
Other: Peer tutor, honor roll, random freelance coding gigs, volunteer hours. (probably wont mention in apps)
LORs: Positive but not glowing/personal (didn’t chat up teachers much).
Essays: Shooting for 8–9/10, personal narrative about trust, leadership, scaling a virtual economy, near-disaster rollback story.
College List: UPenn (ED M&T or Wharton), UCLA, UC Berkeley, USC, CMU, Northeastern, JHU, UMich Ross, (Im applying to 28 colleges a lot of T20s but some safeties as well.)