Chance Me for T20s: Half Arab/Half Asian, First-Gen, 1500 SAT, International, Need full aid [GCSE 5A* 7A, A-level predicted 3A* 1A, social sciences]

Chance Me / Match Me
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Demographics
International student
Private HS, Sends 2-3 IVYs every year
Half Arab/Half Bangladeshi
First Generation

Intended Major(s)
South Asian Studies, Political Science, Public Policy

GPA, Rank, and Test Scores

  • Unweighted HS GPA: N/A
  • Weighted HS GPA (GCSEs): 5A+, 7As & 3A+ 1 A (A Level predicted)
  • Class Rank: Top 1%
  • ACT/SAT Scores: 1500 SAT

Coursework
A Levels:
Economics, History, Sociology, and Global Perspectives

Awards
Member, National Futsal Team (11 out of 3200+)
Scholar, USEFP EducationUSA Competitive Counselling Club, Top 1% nationwide
Finalist, New York Times Annual Podcast Contest, Top 40 of 1,100+ entries
Ranked #2 out of 2300+ participants, National Philosophy Olympiad, Selected for IPO 29 & 30
Academic High Achiever; 100% Merit Scholarship for 4 years (Private HS)

Extracurriculars

  1. Head Boy/Student Body President
  2. Founder & Creative Director, Arab Family Restaurant (Dad is Arab, did this for him, work full-time to support family)
  3. Founder, Civics Org (Digital platform on anthro-norms)
  4. Researcher at MIT Media Lab, Social Impact Through Cinematic Bias Analysis
  5. Soccer, Right Winger Player, National Futsal Team (co-led team in int’l & nat’l matches)
  6. Founder & Chief Media Officer, xyz MMA League (Start-up on entertainment sports)
  7. Applicant Interviewer (2022-2024), Student (2022), MIT LaunchX (Immersive incubator program for scaleable startups)
  8. President, Media School for Deaf communities
  9. President & Executive Board Chairperson, Model United Nations & Debate Society
  10. Filmmaker, Company X (Promoted interfaith harmony via short films)

Essays/LORs/Other
Was about my parent’s separation and how i navigated through the turmoil by trying to bring them back together. talked about my dad’s entrepreneurial nature and how he failed with his ventures all his life. embraced my dad’s arab roots, and learned how to make shawarmas with him. did not live with him so every second mattered, until i gave him the idea that we should open a food stall. while my parents did not come back together, I learned how to build, and build beautifully.

wrote a supplement on a terrorist attack I was a victim of in my country. wrote another one on learning sign language being an underresourced first gen kid.

overall, i really like my essays. I am the Student Body President of my school, therefore, i believed my LORs would be solid. My external rec is by my MIT professor.

Cost Constraints / Budget
Need full aid :frowning:

Schools
I didn’t apply ED.

I’ve applied to:
Stanford, Columbia, Duke, Richmond, Vassar, NYU, Bates, to name a few.

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I cannot judge your academic credentials, but you appear to be a strong, well accomplished applicant. Congratulations on your achievements!

Acceptance to these schools, especially as an international applicant, is very hard so it’s difficult to predict your chances. But you will know within the next 3 weeks. So hang in there.

I also hope you have good back ups in your home country.

Good luck!

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As an international student who needs full aid, and is applying to colleges with very low acceptance numbers…it’s impossible to chance you at all really.

But here are some things.

NYU, Columbia, Bates, Vassar, Richmond will meet your full need if accepted. They are need aware for admissions. But I think you have a strong application so just wait and see.
Good luck!

From Stanford:

If you are not a U.S. citizen, legal permanent resident or an undocumented student, your request for financial aid will be a factor in our admission evaluation. While financial aid resources are limited for international citizens, Stanford does offer admission to a number of these applicants each year

From Duke:

Financial resources for international students are limited. Each year Duke University expects to enroll 20 to 25 international students whose full demonstrated need has been met with a university-provided need-based aid package.

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You seem to be an active member of this forum! Could you give me a good idea of my chances to your experience, though? I understand it is difficult. But, the anxiety is kicking in as I waited for my results :frowning:

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You appear to be an average excellent applicant with some strong ECs balanced against bring international and needing full aid (some of these schools will weigh that in admissions).

So I’d say your chances are likely in the low single digit percent range.

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You are too unusual an applicant to be considered average excellent. If you applied to all of the colleges that meet full need of accepted intl students, i think one might bite, in particular the LACs.

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So one of the reasons we cannot really give you a meaningful probability assessment is I believe the highest admit rate college you named is Richmond at 24%, and they are need aware for Internationals, and you are apparently very high need. I do not know how many applicants like that Richmond gets, and I do not know how many it then offers what they need, but usually that admit rate is just a small fraction of their overall admit rate. And it is very, very competitive Internationals they are turning down to get to that low admit rate.

But not impossible, of course.

The other big issue is it is hard for us to know how these colleges will react to your essays and recommendations (which you cannot see). Odds are they are good, but will they be good enough to stand out among the other highly-qualified Internationals competing for those precious few slots? Where good enough is defined in a very subjective way by each college? We really are in no position to say.

But that’s OK. You were a plausible candidate, and you have done your best. And shortly you will find out if it worked.

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Hello!!! I got a full-ride to Oberlin!!! I would love any advice/tips for someone coming to the US.

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you were right :slight_smile:

Waitlisted at: Vassar, Pomona, Williams.

Accepted to: Oberlin

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Congratulations. You can only attend one school, so all you needed was one acceptance.

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Oberlin is a great college. My advice is to quickly get involved in some fun, social activities. It is an excellent way to meet people.

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Congratulations ! :tada::clap: That’s AMAZING!
Now, on to accepting the offer, finding the admitted student groups on social media, emailing international admissions to ask about what credits you get for ALevels…
Check your FA package to see whether Health Insurance is included.
You will have to prepare for your visa hearing - order a passport first if you don’t have one (it can take time). During your visa interview, they’ll ask what you’re going to study, where, why there, how you’ll pay for it, and will want to see proof you will return to your country after graduation.

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Thank you so much, everyone! It’s a literal dream. I have a few questions:

  • How is Ohio as a place?
  • Is there anything I should keep in mind in terms of my college experience?

Also, my package has health insurance covered, as well as housing, food, activities, and everything. It requires me to work a bit too but thats okay.

  • Are college towns as scary as they seem?
  • Can I get some idea as to how liberal arts are viewed in the US?
  • And lastly, I know Oberlin is pretty good but is a low ranked school or is it viewed similar to any other lib. arts if i do well?

I know these are novice questions, but I’ve never visited the US and I have no clue how to look at things.

Thank you!

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What might give you the impression that college towns are scary?

Liberal arts are fairly common as college majors in the US.

Oberlin is generally considered respectable academically. It does have a more left wing political reputation than most colleges (which tend to be more left leaning generally), with attendant greater hostility from the right.

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In a way, Ohio is sort of a microcosm of the US. The political, cultural, and social mix very much depends on where you are talking about–big city? Small town or rural? Suburb? What kind of suburb? And so on. There are also some notably different regions in Ohio that have different long histories that can still be a factor in the local culture. Oberlin is near Cleveland, so that is in the Great Lakes part of Ohio. It is hard to describe what all that means, but as relevant to college students, generally the Great Lakes culture is relatively pro-education and takes pride in being nice.

There is a lot, but as a general theme, US colleges like Oberlin are really intended to be about much more than just your classes. So make sure you are really getting out and exploring what Oberlin has to offer outside of your classes.

I guess the question is why do you consider them scary?

“College towns” can cover a lot of different scenarios, but generally speaking college towns tend to be relatively safe places with a lot of amenities designed for use by students, faculty, and staff at the college. There is a sort of perennial concern about whether long-term residents who are not faculty or staff will get along with students, but my two cents is that stuff is often overreported and overemphasized because it fits into certain anti-college narratives that some people like to promote. I think the truth is the normal lived experience of college students in college towns is that, say, the local shops and restaurants and such are happy to have the business.
And again particularly in the Great Lakes, they are likely to be nice by default because that is the culture.

That’s a very complex question. I think there are a lot of professionals in fields like business, government, law, and so on who very much value a broad liberal arts education, with the expectation your subject-specific education will occur in postgrad or, even more so, on the job. I think there are other people, often not people who are themselves working professionals, who think liberal arts are a waste of time, an expensive indulgence for families with more money than sense. And everything in between.

But the brute fact is people are still going to colleges like Oberlin, and still doing very well in their careers, often with some additional postgraduate education but not always. So even if some people do not understand why that works, it does in fact work.

Generic college rankings really are not worth much concern, and are particularly pointless as applied to LACs, where the whole point is they are not generic substitutes for each other.

Oberlin has a long history of being recognized as one of the “top” LACs in the country. I would tend to think of its peers as colleges like Bates, Macalester, and other places with strong reputations and somewhat distinctive personalities. Placement is very individualized, but just as an example, in terms of PhD placement per capita, in this study Oberlin was 16th, as it happens right between Princeton and Yale:

This is a little misleading because Oberlin attracts more people interested in academic paths. Still, point being it is doing a great job supporting such people.

Edit: By the way, one thing that is worth knowing is that “liberal arts college” is usually more short for “liberal arts and sciences college”. I mention this because LACs in that sense were traditionally strong in the S and M in STEM, and also Social Sciences, not just Humanities and Arts.

What was usually not included are what are sometimes called vocational or pre-professional schools and majors, and traditionally engineering was treated in that category. So not so much the T and E in STEM, nor things like undergrad business programs (the idea is you would get a traditional liberal arts education before going into business, and later maybe get an MBA or such).

That being said, all that is somewhat in flux, including because of the rising popularity of tech and pre-professional degrees relative to traditional liberal arts and sciences degrees. So, more LACs have been adding some form of business program, some now have engineering, MANY have CS (although some would claim that is an outgrow of traditional sciences anyway), and so on.

OK, but Oberlin specifically does not have business or engineering. However, it does have sciences, math, and CS. And in fact, it was #33 on the CS PhD feeders list, #42 for Math, #47 for Physics, and #11 for Bio (very strong department at Oberlin).

I am just noting this because some people have this impression everyone at a Liberal Arts College like Oberlin is reading French poetry, studying Art History, or such (not that there is anything wrong with that). But these colleges are also very serious about undergraduate education in the natural and social sciences, and the quality of the education they provide is reflected in the fact they do quite well in PhD placement and such.

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  • I was going to say Ohio is a microcosm of the US but @NiceUnparticularMan beat me to it!
    You have industrial cities that were among the richest in the country 100 years ago, like Cleveland, polluted everything (look up “Cuyahoga river on fire”), collapsed during de industrialisation, and have been clawing their way back (Columbus, Cincinnati, and Cleveland in particular); large, midwestern-style rural areas, including some areas where the Amish live (think of the film Witness); a mini Bible Belt; dozens and dozens of colleges, public and private, because education is/has been valued; vacation spots along the lakes (from the 50s to the 80s, even factory workers got 2 weeks paid holiday and often spent them at the beach by the lakes so lots of fun resort towns were developed then); world-class resewrch facilities, orchestra/concert hall, zoo, sports, sports museums, museums of all sorts…

If you want to see a little what ordinary life is like there, you can watch the tv comedy “The Middle”: it shows a middle/working class family that would be pretty typical (do keep in mind it’s a comedy so events&people are exaggerated for comic purpose). The film Liberal Arts by Josh Radnor (which really is about 3 people who wish they were another age: a 19 year old who wishes she were 25, a man in his 30s who wishes he were 25, and a retiring 70 year old professor who wishes he were 50 again) also shows you Ohio and life at a Liberal Arts College. The best LACs embody a sort of ethos -that being intellectually curious is a virtue, and that a broad, challenging education that feeds that curiousity and expands it through discussion and research will be transformative -something that is also apparent and simultaneously gently mocked in the film. (That ethos is also implied in the film The other half, where the main character is supposed to represent that so much her teacher recommends she apply to Grinnell. The film itself is about entirely different matters and follows Cyrano de Bergerac’s playbook but in a moderm HS in the Pacific Northwest.)

What do you find scary about college towns?
The best time to experience college towns is when you’re in college. :yum: Logically!
More so than in regular cities, a lot is geared toward people 16-22. For instance, unlike many US cities that remain car-centric to the point some areas may not have public buses, bike lanes, or even sidewalks, college towns all have a good bus/walk/bike network because most college students aren’t allowed to have a car on campus.
We could answer that question better if we understood why college towns seem scary to you.

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