CS major - Columbia, Swarthmore, UChicago

Chance Me / Match Me
1

Hi all,

I would like to ease my nerves a bit about applications and get some people to give me a little bit of wisdom on my changes at various schools. I’m going into senior year at a small-ish HS in the Long Island area (yikes). I’m a white male and want to go into CS (yikes x2). My main perks are my EC’s, but I lack in my GPA.

GPA: 3.8 UW, 4.02 W (School does weighting oddly, don’t look too closely at that number)
ACT: 34
SAT II:
Math 1 - 760
Physics - 800
Math 2- 780
AP’s:
English - Yet to come back
Physics - 5
Euro - 4
CS - 5
US - 3 (yikes x3)
No IB’s at my school

Extracurricular CS:
My main draw is that I work as Director of Technology and Technology Education at a technology literacy 501c(3) nonprofit. We’re not huge (not including name), but we have a few branches, some in US and other countries. I’ve written code from time to time, but my main role is developing curriculum which is distributed to other branches and teaching at my local chapter. Some of the curriculum I’ve written gets sold/used by a few groups (Microsoft and DHS notably), but we mainly use it internally. I’m also in all of their marketing, for some reason.

I’m also head (2 years) of CS at my school’s Robotics club. We’ve done pretty well and have received a few awards, but nothing major. I’ve spent lots of time there and may become president by next year (we’re very unorganized).

I also keep an active GitLab profile (Code hosting site similar to GitHub), where I post code I write for one reason or another. I also keep a good number of pet projects going, various things I dragged into existence, some ML projects and such. I also use GitLab for my blog where I talk about tech. It can range from code-level technicality or just talking about general trends in tech. IDK, no real rules.

May be TA in a CS class next year, but don’t know for sure.

Extracurricular CS:
I’m a classical singer by training. I train with a professor at a local college and have lots of experience singing various stuff (arias, art songs, opera). I was a local winner at the Classical Singer Competition and was invited to the national competition twice (I only actually went once). I’m also a finalist in the Metropolitan Lyric Opera competition in NY, one of the student selected for ACDA-East in Pitsburg. All County for the past few years as well, yadda yadda. Will probably make All-State this year (100 on NYSSMA), but there’s a chance I don’t make it.

I also play violin in my school’s chamber orchestra and a local orchestra outside of school. Decent NYSSMA scores on those as well, but no big stuff.

Applications:

Reaches:
Columbia (ED 1)
Swarthmore (ED 2)
Harvey Mudd
Brown
Olin College of Engineering
UChicago

Targets:
U of Rochester
NYU

Likelys:
WPI

That’s all I have. I’m expecting a ton of “Cool EC’s but GPA sucks so no” comments, but feel free to tell me I suck, I know I do.

2

I don’t know about Columbia, UChicago, or Brown, but I’d say you have a shot in getting into your other reaches and targets.

3

You are a competitive applicant. Your stats and ECs are great. Your GPA is fine. Write amazing essays and you could get accepted to any of these schools

4

Forgive me ignorance, I do not quite understand.

If you want to major in CS, wouldnt you want schools that are known as such? Columbia, Brown, and Chicago are super schools, but not necessarily known for CS. Not putting those schools down by any means, but for CS I am guessing NYU and Rochester are just as good and give you a much easier application process.

If you feel you could compete with the very best, you could consider CMU, Purdue, and Illinois for CS.

Good luck to you. You will be very happy with any of those excellent schools.