Hi, I’m a rising senior from CT interested in a astrophysics or electrical engineering major.
Rice (Applying ED), WashU, MIT, UT Austin, SMU, WPI, RPI, Uconn, UHouston.
Rice is my #1 school. I visited once in April, and will be back in September for another tour and on-campus interview. I am going to make sure to emphasize my passion for the school in the essays. WashU is probably my second choice.
STATS
Class rank - 2/320
ACT (1 sitting - retaking July 13): 32: 35E, 34M, 33S, 27R (worried about reading score)
SAT II - Chem (740), awaiting Physics and Math 2
GPA/Transcript: Nothing lower than A-, unweighted 3.96, weighted 4.289, College GPA is 4.0
I’ve taken the highest level of every class offered. Listed are APs/DE
9: Dual Enrollment French I & French II (only freshman allowed to enroll through DE)
10: AP Chem (5), AP Stats (5), APUSH, also took French 4 H
11: AP Euro (5), US Gov (5), Independent Study in AP Calc BC (4), Physics 1 (4), English Lang (4); DE in Elementary Arabic I & II
12: APES, AP Psych, AP English Lit, Independent Study AP Physics C: E/M, M, Intermediate Arabic I& II (dual enrollment), DE Differential Equations
AWARDS:
URochester’s Bausch + Lomb Honorary Science Award
Academic All-Conference Cheerleader
Top Scholar Awards
ECs
I’m most worried about my ECs b/c cheer literally had taken over my life. We had days with 5 hour practices on school nights. My mom also isn’t home a lot and my parents are divorced, and I generally don’t have a ride to things, which also hinders my ability.
FALL VARSITY CHEERLEADING - 9, 10, 11
*Season ran from the week after school’s completion in June through Thanksgiving
*About 10-15 hours/week
UCA All-American Cheerleader
WINTER VARSITY CHEERLEADING - 9, 10
*Season ran from the week before Thanksgiving through first week of March
*Competition (had to try out to be on Comp team - higher level), Basketball Games
*About 15-25 hours depending on the week
~kind of worried the fact that I didn’t try out for winter junior year might hurt me, but the team turned veryyy toxic and I wanted to just focus on school at that point~
STUDENT DEMO - 12
*Volunteer position for a local Youth Cheerleading Team
*Runs August thru Nov/Dec
Debate Club - 9, 10, 11, 12 (Co-President jr. and sr year)
*Informal club, duties included running meetings, scheduling, and research
*1-2 hrs a week, only during school year
Tutor (both volunteer through Peer Tutor Club and Paid Out of School)
French Honor Society (president), English, Math, Science, National
Thank you so much! If you want to reverse chance me, that’s great too!
Oh, and my recs are from my Physics teacher (should be good), AP Euro teacher (who I’ve known since freshman year), and my counselor one should be pretty good since I check in with her a lot.
Rice plays in Division 1 and has cheerleaders for many of the sports, including volleyball, football and men’s and women’s basketball. Your skill and dedication to this activity may make you stand out from the majority of Rice and Wash U applicants. Wash U also has a cheer team. One of my daughter’s friends from high school is on the Wash U cheer squad.
Hopefully your reading score will come up when you retake the ACT. The ACT is a speed exercise. Do lots of timed practice tests for the reading section to improve your speed. Read the questions first before reading the passage. Then hone in on the portion of the passage mentioned in the question to look for the answer. http://cheer.rice.eduhttps://www.washubears.com/athletics_department/cheerleading
Also a warning about the WashU Physics department-it’s not the most female friendly. For a while there were no women tenure track faculty and there is a professor in the department known for sexist viewpoints.
@h8annah the Engineering department at WasU is more diverse, although there are probably more female BME majors than Electrical or CompSci, although my son (CompSci minor) says that there are girls in his classes and there are female TAs in the CompSci classes.
WashU Engineering is fine, but BME is probably the preeminent major there and EECS is less well known.
I think you have a really solid chance at Rice ED, cheerleading is a spike for you. I would take the ACT one more time to see if you can up the reading score, but even with the 27 you are competitive.
I retook the ACT on July 13 @supernovacoach@Hamurtle@CU123 . I was kind of late with taking the ACT (my first sitting was the June 8 date) and tbh I was so burned out from AP Exams at that point, I think it was negatively reflected in my reading score. I definitely feel a lot better about the reading score on this test, and I think that it was just a matter of me not pacing myself well enough and test-day anxiety, as every practice section I got a 32+. If my reading score didn’t go up on this test, I’m taking the SAT on the August date. Interestingly, I perform better on the reading sections of the SAT than the ACT and vice versa for math.
@twoinanddone I really can’t concentrate on anything else because cheerleading has been life basically since elementary school. I’m not cheering next year on the hs team, but I’m going to be a student demonstrator for a youth team. I do want to continue with cheer in college but it’s not my priority when cheering schools.
so, my new ACT composite was still a 32, though my reading was a 33. This would make my superscore 34, but I don’t think Rice, for example, superscores.
WashU superscores ACT/SAT, so the 34 should be fine.
National AP Scholar is not much of a big deal unfortunately. List it in the Common App under academic honors but it doesn’t really make a difference in your application.
This is what Rice says about super scoring, “When reviewing SAT scores, we use the highest score from each section across all administrations. For the ACT, we look at the best composite score and the best subscores, regardless of whether those subscores are from the administration where the best composite score was earned. We hope applicants will report all scores knowing that we will recombine the sections to get the best possible set of scores for each candidate.” https://admission.rice.edu/policies/standardized-testing
@Houston1021 , I did remember hearing something like that at the info session; I was a little confused as to what it meant, but I think it means that while they will look at my 35, 34, 33, 33 (highest), they still will consider me a 32. @Hamurtle Thank you so much! I think I’m the only junior in my school to get National AP Scholar (not many students get it at all, but if they do it’s senior year), so I thought maybe that was noteworthy. Though, most of the schools on my list don’t have any applicants from my HS.
