Hi, I am currently a high school senior and I am shooting for pretty competitive schools for college such as : University of Michigan, University of Florida, UCLA, UC Berkely, Stanford, UVA, Vanderbilt, and more. I do have safeties too.
Race: White
Rank: 2/465
GPA 5.2/4 or 4.0 GPA unweighted
ACT: 33 one sitting (super score is 34)
SAT Subject: none
APs: AP Lang (4), AP Chem (4), APUSH(5), AP Stat (3), AP Calc (IP), AP Bio (IP), AP Lit (IP), AP Spanish (IP). All of my other courses during high school were honors.
Sports: Varsity XC 2 years, Varsity Track 2 years, Varsity Swimming 4 years, Varsity Rowing 2 years
For XC, Track, and Swimming I am a Captain
Other Extra Curriculars:
-science league
-math league
-tutor
-SGA (president and vice president) 4 years
-NHS
-Rutgers Mini-Medical Program
-Community service over 300+ hours
-NJ Boys State Alumni
-Gay straight Alliance
-REACH (drugs and alcohol awareness)
Awards:
-I was awarded academic excellence for 3 years out of my high school career so far (All A’s)
-NHS induction
I feel that my essay and supplemental essays were pretty good. For my main essay I wrote about the struggle of coming out to a very conservative family and how it affected me as a student and a person. I then wrote about how I helpd others from this dark time in my life.
Teacher reccomendations should be great because the teachers I asked reccomendations from are very close with me and I excelled in their class.
The interview I had with Stanford went amazing. The interviewer and I talked for over 2 hours and he really liked me.
Please give me any advice for my Regular Decision Applications too! If I need to change anything of some sort. Thanks!
I would say you have a good shot, best at UFL or UMich. What is your “spike/hook” though? If you can nail this question down and clearly answer it on your application, you would have a very strong chance at the top schools.
A spike is generally one area you excel in and a hook is being a legacy, recruited athlete, etc. It makes you more memorable/more wanted, for lack of a better phrase
@seanm4325 a spike is just like a certain direction of an application like for example, someone heavily involved with computer science could have big awards in computer engineering or like taken all math science courses and maybe some writers could have their work published, or taken ap lit classes etc. etc.
sorry, should’ve been more clear. find your spike. again, best of luck
I would put in how my spike is that I took many Math and Science courses throughout high school and took the most rigoruous ones I could take that my high school has to offer. Also, in my Stanford application for one of the supplementals I talked about how I was so in love with mathematics ever since I was a little kid and gave a personal anecdote of my youth. Also, I excelled greatly with Math League, but sadly my school doesn’t go out of our district. Lastly, with science I furthered my interest with doing the Mini-Medical Program which I think would be somehwat of a spike.
Recalculate your UC GPA. OOS GPA gets weighting from AP/IB/DE only. The OOS Honors classes receive no GPA weighting. And it also helps to spell the name of the flagship University of California campus name correctly. Do not make the same mistake on your apps.