chance me please please please

Start by turning off caps lock.

Your “dream” schools are all reaches. The privates are a roll of the dice even for applicants with near-perfect grades, test scores, essays, and several unique extracurriculars. The first thing you should do when applying to college is find a safety you’d love to attend.

You’re halfway through your junior year, so starting a club just to have “Founder of club fighting discrimination against left-handed midgets” or some equally contrived activity on your resumé won’t do you any favors (not that it would do most freshmen/sophomores any favors either).

Good test scores are a necessity if you want a fighting chance at top colleges. Keep getting strong grades. Write good essays, and ask teachers who know you well for recommendations. These factors matter a lot more than you’d think. Beyond that, you have some extracurriculars, so spare us the hyperbole. There was a kid posting here a while back whose parents don’t allow him to do anything but study. He goes home, studies, watches TV, and that’s it. You’ve invested some time in fencing - it could be an interesting angle to play up in your essays. Volunteering at your local library is a perfectly respectable extracurricular.

The above will make up 90% of any admissions decision. The other 10% - hooks, in-state or out-of-state, billionaire donor parents - stems from factors beyond your control. The odds are against your getting into any of the schools you’ve listed,* so reconcile yourself to that fact right now. That’s why elite-college admissions don’t reflect your personal worth, any more than a coin flip would, because that’s what the process is even for the “perfect” applicants.

*unless you’re in-state for UCB