Do I have a fighting chance or should i just not bother applying to caltech?

Colleges & Universities California Institute of Technology
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<p>I am a Puerto Rican male that grew up in a small town in Puerto Rico. Went to a small public high school there. I desperately want to study aeronautics/astronautics even though i know Caltech only has a concentraion. Have been obsessed with planes all my life. Here are my stats:
SAT (old) Math800 Verbal620
SAT II’s MathIIC 800, Writing 750, physics 800
GPA 3.9/4.0
class sized small so no ranking
unfortunately no Ap’s offered at my school
all A’s in math and science courses, only B’s were in spanish class</p>

<p>President of National Honor Society
President of Math team
National merit semfi finalist
participated in science club, science team
Western Forensic League, 1st place record 3 times row in category of Oratory and Poetry
school basketball team, baseball team
Winner of island district sceince fair in 2003 and 2004
worked at the Laboratory for Image Processing and Remote Sensing at the University of Puerto Rico
selected as a research apprentice by NASA for high school summer research program. (NASA SHARP Plus)
Worked at Georgia tech in the dept. of aerospace engineering
Published paper a the Lockheed Martin Student Symposium (“The determination of Drag of slender bodies using empirical methods”)
Published paper (“The extraction of meteorological data and the use of UNIX in climatic analysis”) in the Rice University journal for scientfiic computing at minority institutions.</p>

<p>Also, I have been flying since i was 12 and was one of the youngest certified private pilots on the island. I have more than 500 hrs logged as a pilot and plan to obtain my commerical pilot’s license. </p>

<p>I know my EC’s and stats are weak especially the verbal. Maybe I should take the TOEFL. My english isn’t that good even though PR is a US territory. After all it is only my second language. I do also have a working knowledge of German and Russian. My school was very weak and didn’t offer very much. I self studied physics with a little help from my dad and got an 800 on the SATII. Does this help? I don’t have the “poor minority” thing going for me either. My father is a professor of Mechanical Engineering here. Do you think i should still go for it.</p>

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<p>You have a good shoot, go for it!</p>

3

<p>Yes, you should definitely go for it. Your scores are quite decent, and the self-study physics followed by an 800 is definitely worth mentioning. It will help your chances a lot. 600-level scores on writing aren’t considered all that terrible here – if the other parts of an application are strong, we’d be quite happy to overlook standardized scores in a subject that isn’t even teh main focus here.</p>

<p>Your science extracurriculars are quite nice.</p>

<p>You definitely have a fighting chance. Go for it.</p>

4

<p>im guessing that 750 on the writing might also help out ur 620 on the verbal. A girl I know who went to MIT only got a 690 on the math section for the SATI, but got an 800 on the math IIC, and got accepted. Anyway, you definitely have a good shot.</p>