GPA: 3.5, weighted (I don’t know how the courses are weighted - this represents mostly A’s and B’s except for one year when he missed the last quarter of school and got D’s).
ECs: Varsity athlete 3 years (year-round sport), works 20 hours a week (since he was old enough, and worked as much as allowed when he was younger).
SAT: 1400
Residency: VA
Special circumstances: He had a medical issue junior year and missed a lot of school, resulting in a 2.5 gpa for that year and a lot of D’s and even one F. All the other years he was around 3.9-4.0 weighted. Graduating on-time.
He has taken the most rigorous AP math and science classes, and the HL IB courses offered. No IB diploma. 4 years of Honors English and History.
His first choice was Virginia Tech, but that’s probably not realistic anymore.
You haven’t completely filled out the template - classes taken etc. how many years of English, math, language, science and social science ? What is the highest level class in each ?
And what is the unweighted gpa? Weighted is not easy to use because schools weight differently. To figure unweighted, take each A and give it a 4, a B = 3, C = 2, etc. Use academic classes (not pe). Add up the score and divide by # of classes.
I assume you mean Penn State and not Penn, given the major.
Need to understand the classes taken and more - hence a template is provided. How is he making up the D’s and Fs? Wil graduation be delayed.
Give each a - 4 points. Each B 3 points. Each 2C 2 points
If there are 36 classes and 100 points, then take 100/36.
No one can chance you with what you provided but you might add WVU as a non selective school that’s nearby and with the major. Or Radford for an in state option.
And make sure you understand the costs. PSU is $60k a year for tuition, room and board with little chance of merit. U Del is also $60k is with a chance of merit. WPI is $85k or so for tuition, room and board b4 merit.
Hopefully his guidance counselor is going to be able to write something about what happened junior year and the medical issues, which might address some of the issues with the junior year grades. I’m terrible at chancing people, and I think it’s just going to be hard to predict with such a complicated junior year, so I’d suggest making sure he has a few really solid admit schools just in case those other options don’t work out.
If he already has some of those, please feel free to ignore the below. If not, I’d guess that these might be easier admits for him.
If you/he want to stay in Virginia, I think George Mason, ODU, VCU, CNU and Radford all have some sort of cybersecurity major. Those are four very different locations (four since ODU and CNU are nearish each other) and all different vibes, but we’ve known people who have been happy at all of them, perhaps one would be a good fit for your student?