Intended Major(s)
Business, Finance GPA, Rank, and Test Scores
Unweighted HS GPA: 3.67 (might be a 3.7 by the end of the semester)
Weighted HS GPA: N/A
Class Rank: N/A
ACT/SAT Scores: N/A
Coursework
Geometry, Chinese 3 Awards
None Extracurriculars (Include leadership, summer activities, competitions, volunteering, and work experience)
Currently part of the Boost program at Berkeley Haas (leadership program)
A FOG Tutor in SF Library (Volunteer)
SAGE program (STEM-based)
A member of the School Site Council
Part of a mentor club in School
Cost Constraints / Budget (High school students: please get a budget from your parents and use the Net Price Calculators on the web sites of colleges of interest.)
Not sure yet
Schools (List of colleges by your initial chance estimate; designate if applying ED/EA/RD; if a scholarship is necessary for affordability, indicate that you are aiming for a scholarship and use the scholarship chance to estimate it into the appropriate group below)
OK - it’s way too early to know if you can get into UCs or Stanford. It’s also too early to label them as matches or really any categorization although you’ll likely need to do better than a 3.7.
You’ll be grades, rigor, test score (not for UCs), ECs and more.
Be the best you that you can be.
Get involved - at school (sports, clubs, band), the community (jobs, ECs, etc.) and college will take care of itself wherever you end up.
You are waaaaaay too early to be thinking about this though.
Keep in mind, you are from the bay area where competition is fierce and if you read the individual 2024 UC campuses threads, you will see there are a lot of unhappy parents complaining about their outcomes.
And sorry, but the top six UCs are not a match for anyone: UCB, UCLA, UCSD, UCI, UCD, and UCSB. Just read the post about an angry mom complaining about her son admitted to Stanford for REA but didn’t get into UCD and you will see.
Do the best you can with classes and engage in activities you like and see where that takes you in 2 years.
Just FYI only UCI, UCR and UCB (from this year) offer undergraduate business programs. At the other UCs you will have to pick something adjacent like econ or econ and accounting. Among the CSUs a lot more offer business programs with Cal Poly-SLO, SDSU and CSUF being popular among applicants.
To answer your original question about ECs, leadership and VOLUNTEERING worked for the kids at my school for similarly competitive schools.
But don’t just randomly volunteer and get leadership roles, find a certain area you’re passionate about and volunteer and gain leadership in that area (tutoring kids, animal rescue, environmental or social activism, etc). It both will be more fulfilling for you and will go a much longer way.
Ps, Berkeley and I’m pretty sure also UCLA aren’t matches for anyone
Whatever you do, make it something you care about. You have to spend the time doing it, and the odds are very high that it won’t make a difference and you won’t get into the highly rejective schools no matter your record. That’s the way it is…too many highly qualified students applying to too few schools. So, do it for its own sake. If you get in all the better. If not, you won’t feel as if your time was wasted.
FAR more important is your GPA. It’s the first litmus test at every school. Your freshman grades have probably already pushed you out of contention at competitive programs like Cal Poly that use them. Most schools don’t, so take it as a wake up call to raise it if you want a chance at competitive schools like the ones you’ve mentioned.
Because you’re low income, it may be worth it to start exploring meet-need schools. A lot of them are on the East coast and you may not have heard of them so it’ll increase awareness. Just browse and click, no need to focus yet.
It’s too early to know whether you’d qualify but Questbridge targets high achieving lower income juniors to help them prepare their application and seniors to match them with highly selective colleges. You can start looking at each of the colleges on that list but don’t get too attached since you don’t know whether you’ll qualify.
The most important colleges for you though will be safeties you like and can afford. They’re difficult to find because you need to like something about them AND your parents must be able to afford them -they can’t be a throw-away after you’ve written a Christmas list of famous universities. One will likely be your local CSU for a less-impacted or non-impacted major and you may have to commute. If you want campus life, some public universities that are more residential include CSU Chico (good honors program, too), SDSU, Sonoma, Humboldt, and UCM.
For UCs, As in honors, APs and dual-enrollment classes taken between Sophomore year and summer after junior year will boost your chances.
I just want to emphasize that there is a very large universe of colleges out there, with all sorts of cool academic programs, different sizes, formats, and setting, different ways of being affordable, and so on. So when the time comes in a couple years to get serious about developing a college application list, the goal will be to find colleges that fit YOUR interests and YOUR needs and YOUR preferences. You should not try to conform yourself to whatever some pre-conceived list of colleges want.
And if you do it that way, and pick a reasonable list of Likelies, Targets, and Reaches that meet YOUR requirements, you really cannot go wrong.
UC’s don’t care about Freshman grades and are Test Blind (for now).
I’d experiment with some business related EC’s. DECA is good if you have it available and they have competitions. Main thing is try to take as challenging of a course load as you can while maintaining A’s. Experiment a bit to make sure of what you want to study but then start to build a story around that. Think creatively by maybe starting a little business over the Summer doing something you enjoy.