@dangusdorangus Your profile looks fine only in a stereotypical sense but your scores are very strong. The upward trend in GPA will certainly helps as well. Do well in your essays (the supplement asks you to do things like design or class or describe something you taught yourself over the past year, so be able to show that you have a desire to learn, think deeply, and articulate your interests well) and you should have a decent shot, but please hope your CS teacher’s rec. is not a flop because I think that once you are in the “possibly admit” category, they actually read that stuff: If admissions works anything like this depiction, it is not a joke that relies too heavily on stats to put one over the top. They seem very nuanced which may explain all of the surprise no’s and yeses I’ve seen on this forum from Emory in the past 2 years:http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/issues/2014/autumn/features/freshman.html . I was stuck in the mode of thinking: “since Emory’s admit rates and stats are lower than peer schools, these people with high stats, especially when applying ED, are automatically in” This seems not to be the case.
Shameless plug: If you came to Emory, major in chemistry
and dabble with the best biology and CS courses (actually many of my more successful friends did something along this line and got good job offers). You seem more quantitatively/computationally inclined and biology does have some solid offerings that are quantitative and problem solving oriented (such as physical biology, population biology, and advanced molecular genetics, and a new one rolling out next spring-computational modelling which is taught by the same awesome guy who teaches physical biology) but the chemistry department may be a better fit because that is its very nature. Plus, I think it is changing to favor people like you with strong backgrounds coming in and varied interests and those changes will be rolled out in the year you are to enroll if admitted. You can see a general ideas of what these changes are supposed to be be here (more towards bottom of the article): http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i9/Revising-Chemistry-Curriculum.html . I think if they do it well, a person like you will benefit. For example, instead of learning the barebone basics in gen. chem like at most schools for example, you may learn cooler things in a non-lecture format. Or better yet, you can skip to intro. courses in other disciplines such as biochemistry. The beginning of bio may actually be a turn-off (however, you would be a student capable of doubling up and finding out your preferences yourself)…I feel there are more top instructors for the freshman courses in chemistry than there are in biology.