Chance Me/Match Me for Biomedical Engineering [International living in VA, 3.97 UW GPA, $120k-150k family income]

Chance Me / Match Me
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Demographics

  • International Student (not a US citizen nor a permanent resident so I am considered international)
  • State/Location of residency: Virginia
  • Type of high school (or current college for transfers): Large public high school
  • Other special factors: First generation immigrant

Cost Constraints / Budget
Family income is around $120k-150k

Intended Major(s): Biomedical Engineering

GPA, Rank, and Test Scores

  • Unweighted HS GPA: 3.97 UW GPA
  • Class Rank: N/A
  • ACT/SAT Scores: 1510 SAT (710 RW; 800 Math)

List your HS coursework

  • English: AP Lang, English 12 DE
  • Math: AP Calculus BC, Multivariable Calculus DE
  • Science: AP Biology, AP DE Chemistry, AP Physics C Mechanics, Physics DE
  • History and social studies: AP World, AP US History, AP Gov, AP Psych
  • Language other than English: Completed 4 years of Spanish
  • Visual or performing arts: Guitar (highest level of guitar at my school)

Awards

Extracurriculars
10, 11, 12 - **Research Intern at Georgetown Med:** worked on developing novel computational model for predicting drug binding affinities, resulting in filed patent, published preprint in biorxiv, and ongoing nature communications peer review as first-author.

11, 12 - **Research Contributor at AI Company:** research volunteer/contributor to AI company focused on embeddings and representation learning at MIT CSAIL. working on single-cell embeddings, phenotype and genotype layers, cell representation learning, etc.

9, 10, 11, 12 - **US East Youth Lead for Nonprofit**: been volunteering with this nonprofit about disabilities since freshman year and am currently the lead for the US East portion of their high school volunteering program. helped raise thousands of dollars, advocacy of assistive technologies, and around 300 hours of volunteering. Submitted proposal regarding assistive technologies and venue upgrades to LA 2028 paralympics committee.

11, 12 - **Research Volunteer at Med AI Company**: working to build open-source agentic medical fact verifier from LLMs through reinforcement learning, with applications in future medical LLM training. Likely resulting in biorxiv preprint in 2026 summer/blog post.

9 - **Software Engineering Fellow at AI Company** \- accepted as a software engineering fellow at an AI company, where I built projects and received mentorship from Capital One, Google, Amazone, etc. employees and regularly participated in hackathons. My team and I received top 20 out of 200+ teams in their hackathon.

10 - **Johns Hopkins Global Health Leaders Conference** \- accepted to JHU GLOHEA conference about public health, attended workshops from JHU professors and completed activities that enhanced my global health knowledge.

10, 11, 12 - **President of USA Biology Olympiad at School** \- expanded membership since sophomore year by 120% and led workshops and lessons to teach members about usabo conceptual knowledge. hosted q/a and more.

10, 11 - **Computer Science Honor Society Member** \- went to my former middle school and encouraged python programming by hosting hour of code

11 - **Science Honor Society Member** \- basic biology tutoring

Awards

  1. Maybe: regeneron STS top 300 (will submit after to RD apps as an app update)
  2. State Junior Academy of Sciences Computational Biology 3rd Place
  3. Preprinted 3 first author papers on biorxiv (1 under review @ nature comms.)
  4. Regional science and engineering fair 3rd place in computational biology
  5. Congressional award gold
  6. All state music all 4 years of high school

Essays/LORs/Other
AP Biology Teacher LOR: 9.5/10

AP Calculus BC Teacher LOR: 8.7-9/10

Schools
(List of colleges by your initial chance estimate; designate if applying ED/EA/RD; if unsure, leave them unclassified)

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; also, for colleges that admit by major or division, consider that in chance estimate.

  • Assured (100% chance of admission and affordability): VCU
  • Extremely Likely: Idrk
  • Likely: UVA (EA), Vtech (EA), Case Western (EA)
  • Toss-up: Georgia Tech (EA II), Rice University (RD)
  • Lower Probability: Cornell (RD)
  • Low Probability: JHU for BME, Upenn (RD), Princeton (RD)
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I would add Northwestern University to your list for BME. As an international applicant, it is very, very difficult to gain admission to the most competitive schools. What classes did you earn “B”'s in? What is your AP score breakdown? The non-4.0 GPA and the 710 SAT RW score could be disqualifying during an initial screening (Johns Hopkins, Princeton, UPenn). A comparable international applicant also interested in BME with the higher verbal test score, straight A’s, higher AP scores, & self-funded could win admission.

3

Can you clarify- do neither of your parents have college degrees- from anywhere?

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https://www.schev.edu/financial-aid/in-state-residency says (emphasis added):

Do you qualify for the above provision for in-state tuition in Virginia?

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Great EC’s and academic profile. I see you have Georgia Tech in a toss-up category. Just keep in mind Georgia Tech is a very difficult admit OOS and even more so for Engineering. Stats for OOS for Engineering this cycle were an acceptance rate of 7.5% (32,128 applied and 2,398 accepted.) All majors OOS acceptance rate was 8.9%. On the other hand JHU does have early decision with an acceptance rate usually between 10.5 - 12%. You may want to consider applying ED to JHU as it would increase your odds. Both top BME programs.

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Congratulations on your achievements.

First things first. Posters can’t make the best recommendations until we know your budget. Have you run the NPCs for each school on your list and the results affordable?

Here’s Princeton’s NPC to get you started: Net Price Calculator | Princeton Admission

Note that if an NPC doesn’t specifically ask if you are international, they may be inaccurate.

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Adding also you can see international acceptance rate at the end of section C1 in some college’s common data set (CDS). Penn reports this, it was 2.8% for class of 2029 which is about half the overall rate of 5.4%.

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It’s critical you have a highly likely school for admission that is also affordable. I agree that VCU will be highly likely for admission, but not sure about affordability. Most international students graduating from a VA HS do not qualify for in-state tuition, but please do that research as @ucbalumnus highlighted above. Do you have any highly likely options that are affordable in your home country?

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How much can your family give you annually for your college costs. That is what matters.

What visa are you currently here on?

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I did not earn Bs in any classes. I just earned 2 A- but all As in junior year. I got 5 on ap bio, ap calculus bc, ap lang, apush. i got 4 on ap world, ap stats, ap psych so far.

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They have college degrees, but from asia. I am a first generation immigrant so first one to immigrant here with my family from my family tree.

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This is usually not considered by colleges to be “first generation to college”, although definitions of this vary by college.

12

I wrote first generation immigrant

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I am on H-4 Visa

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@hebegebe what will this student need to do to study here? Visa wise.

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I don’t think this is considered in college admissions. Plus you are an international student. It’s not like you are a first generation citizen.

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My apologies for assuming your grades were "B"s. I forget that many school districts assign +/- grades. You would have a 4.0 GPA without the +/-. You have a nice mix of excellent & very good AP scores; you’re scored the “5” on the exams that are most beneficial to you: biology, calculus, English language. Continuing this trend on additional science AP exams is strongly advised.

One question I have is regarding the USA Biology Olympiad: I think only U.S. citizens & permanent residents qualify to take exams for semifinalist or finalist recognition; would you have qualified had you taken the exam to continue on as a finalist? If so, would you be able to secure an official score report for college admissions purposes? If you earned the one of the higher scores in your class, if not the highest, you’ll want colleges to know it.

I still recommend taking a look at Northwestern and some other programs, like Washington University in St. Louis. It’s no secret that it is much harder for international applicants to win admission. You’ll need to apply to at least 10 “reach” programs (the ones you designate as Lower Probability and Low Probability) if you are aspiring to enroll in one of the more higher-ranking programs and want to maximize the number of potential options available to you in addition to your safety options, like VCU.

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This does not appear to be one of the excluded visas (“The Student not have a current valid student (F), trainee (H3), exchange visitor (J) or vocational (M) visa”) listed in https://www.schev.edu/financial-aid/in-state-residency . You may want to verify directly with the Virginia public universities that you may apply to.

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That won’t count as first gen. The common app asks whether your parents have degrees, and from where.

This may be also be nitpicking, but if you are classed as international you are not an “immigrant” (which would be green card/naturalized citizen). I assume you/your parents are on a visa of some sort? (Edit: I now see discussion of H visa)

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H4 is fine for studying until the student turns 21, at which point they will need to change status to F1 student. However note that no work is allowed on an H4, so if they want to do work or internships during the degree they should change to F1 status earlier.

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However, F visas are listed among those excluded from getting in-state tuition in Virginia by the Tuition Equity provision. Check carefully about whether changing to an F visa after starting college would lose eligibility.