Competitive with 3.86 Weighted GPA?

srobin
Sat, 14 Jun 2008 23:07:04 +0000

DS is a rising Senior and has about 8 or 9 colleges on his short list which are mostly selective. He is looking at Stanford, Univ of Penn, Rice, Vanderbilt, John Hopkins (maybe) Boston Univ, MIT (maybe) Emory, University of Ala (B’ham) as his safety. He may look at Emory because of their dual degree arrangement with Georgia Tech. Would Boston Univ, Rice and Vandy be in the same category?

His unweighted GPA is a 3.49 due to some difficulty in freshman year due to new living arrangements etc. He has consistently made A’s since then in all of his classes and has taken almost all Honors or AP classes. He will be taking all AP classes this year so assuming he makes A’s won’t his unweighted GPA rise?

His SAT scores were CR - 680, Math 620 and Writing 540 for a 1840 total. His ACT score was 32 with high scores in Reading and Math. He ranks 20 in a class size of between 320 - 350 students (I can’t remember which).

He has some EC’s and will have outstanding teacher recommendations, he is attending a summer course at Univ of Ala right now and is taking Math and Chemistry so far he is making A’s.

He will not return home until 7/3/08 and then will be busy working somewhere and writing essays. Since time is growing short I am getting very nervous that he does not have more in-between schools. He is interested in Engineering probably Biomedical and Math. The last thing I want is for April to arrive and him have a bunch of wait list or reject letters and have to settle for the safety. I want him to have choices.

Is he really stretching for the above schools? His guidance counselor seems to think that he is up for it academically. We know Stanford is almost guaranteed to reject him.

Someone please recommend some good alternatives and hopefully I can get him to consider them.