Chance me? I'll chance back!

ellefalloir
Sat, 17 Mar 2012 16:59:25 +0000

MAJOR THING: This is me, speaking from experience/advice other people have given me:
If your school offers AP and IB, take AP courses first before taking IB. If you’re not an international student, or if you’re not applying to any international schools, IB will not be worth it.
Please, please, please do not take the “full IB” route simply because you like the words International Baccalaureate.
AP, if you’re applying to American schools as an undergraduate, can show colleges a wider variety of your aptitude for learning.
If you’re applying to the Columbia-SciencesPo or any of the UPenn transfer degree programs, then take IB.
If you’re not planning to attend any international school outside of the U.S., taking IB will not be worth as much as taking AP.

Understand that. When I was a freshman/sophomore, I wanted to take the IB route as well… I know that it isn’t worth it if you’re applying to elite AMERICAN schools.
Colleges look at test scores as part of the holistic approach. When you take IB, you’ll only have a few test scores to present to colleges as compared to the 5-7 (on average) AP scores you COULD be showing them. Does that make sense? You’ll continue the IB HL testing your senior year, but by then it’ll be too late to show it to colleges— you’ll know which college you’re going to already.

That’s just some advice on my part. PM me if you need more info. I remember the days when I was confused about the IB/AP distinction…

Anyways, you look like you’re on the right track. (: One of my closest senior friends got into Stanford EA (his sister’s at Berkeley!) and he says that a major part of his application was not his scores (a huge amount of perfect and near-perfect SAT scores are sent to Stanford…), but his EC’s and his personality. I’m not kidding you. Personality and/or race has a huge factor in Stanford admissions (then again, he was a URM…), and people who are accepted to HYP even get rejected by Stanford if they present themselves as robots.

Also, a family friend of mine was accepted to Yale four years ago on full scholarship (fin. need, of course). He attended a relatively small school, and his town was “agriculturally-based”, but he showed his distinction through numerous state awards. School awards are nice, and district awards even better, but State and National awards are what the admit. committees are looking for.
It’s too late for me, since I’ll be applying to colleges this year, but YOU should take a look at this:
[Davidson Fellows Scholarships](Scholarships for Gifted Students | Davidson Fellows)

if you want to try for it. If you like science (which I don’t lolol), you could start a project/research and submit it/alter it for Davidson and the typical Siemens, Intel, etc.

THOSE awards are what will get you noticed. c: And trying out for the TASP programs next year won’t hurt either.

tl;dr: Don’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling. Also, stay away from IB if you’re not doing anything extremely international in your college years (studying abroad for a semester or two does not count). Trust me. If, somehow, you realize that you want to stay at a safe Cali public school, your IB credits may be a pain to transfer.