Help: GPA-SAT/Extraccuriculars/Aid

International Students
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<p>Hello everyone. I’m a 15 year old IB student from Sweden who has recently started thinking about studying in the US.</p>

<p>The first issue I’m facing is the SAT’s. I’m not too worried about the Math SAT as I placed in the 99’th percentile in Sweden during our “National tests” (Swedish equivalent of SAT’s), but the other two SAT’s can potentially be a huge setback for me. I have been attending the IB for 2 years in which time I have improved my English substantially. However, I recently looked at some prep questions, and the Improving Sentences/Improving Paragraphs part almost killed me. When I entered the IB 2 years ago my English was at a level where I could only write basic sentences and had issues reading books that most others were capable of reading several years before. Although the English classes have taught me how to read/write at a decent level, there is one thing that we didn’t learn. Grammar. We literally did no grammar past the basic Nouns/Verbs/Adjectives/Pronouns etc. </p>

<p>If I study intensely every day, roughly how long will take for my English to be at an adequate level to score 780+ on both the CR and Writing SAT’s? All I have to do is memorise and apply all the grammatical rules, which is probably a lot harder than it sounds. I’m starting MYP 5 (Year 10) in August, so I basically have 20 months to study.</p>

<p>In addition to the GPA-SAT issue I’m also having issues with awards/extracurriculars. I know that US schools arrange various national competitions, offer sports as well as organise several unique clubs to make students seem more unique.</p>

<p>Over here there is literally nothing. No sports, no clubs, no contests.
Granted I weight lift, Hike and play football (Soccer) in my free time on an almost daily basis (One of them, not all of them every day).
IB also requires 150 hours of community and service and offers involvement with large organizations such as the UN. Will the 150 hours of CAS, involvement with large organizations and perhaps even shadowing professional engineers during the summer do the trick? Or am I inferior to people that are applying from the US?</p>

<p>Lastly there is of course the issue of funding. I come from a pretty average income family that makes roughly $65k/year. My parents have been very supportive of my plan and with their support + me working part time we should be able to drag in $25-$30k/year. This is of course not enough for most of the “top universities” who charge roughly $40k for tuition + $15k or so in other costs. (Forgot to mention that I want study Electrical Engineering)</p>

<p>I have done some research and came up with these schools as possibilities:
Stanford (Need Aware)
MIT (Need Blind)
Caltech (Need Aware)
Cornell (Need Aware)
Princeton (Need Blind)
Columbia (Need Aware)</p>

<p>Other great universities which I would love to apply to but can’t because they don’t offer aid to internationals:
Georgia Tech
UC Berkeley</p>

<p>Are there perhaps any other good engineering schools that are Need Aware that I should be adding to my options?</p>

<p>To whoever cares to reply, thank you in advance. :)</p>

2

<p>Swarthmore
Harvey Mudd
Lehigh
Bucknell
Lafayette</p>

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<p>It is probably harder than it sounds, since those sections are targeted at native speakers. Your English is pretty good right now, so I think a score of 700+ in each is possible with enough studying. Also, you don’t need 780+, you know? Your score probably won’t matter from 750+, and schools are usually more lenient when it comes to the CR scores of internationals whose first language isn’t English. My suggestions for you are the book Direct Hits for vocabulary (which is absolutely ridiculous, who on earth uses those words in regular conversation anyway?) and this topic: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sat-preparation/645763-how-write-12-essay-just-10-days.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sat-preparation/645763-how-write-12-essay-just-10-days.html&lt;/a&gt;
I recommend Direct Hits because it’s a rather short list (I think around 400 words), but effective list that’s very easy to learn. Sparknotes also has a list, but it’s huge and a lot more boring to learn. </p>

<p>Check out Cal Poly, it’s a good engineering school, and even though they don’t offer financial aid for internationals (not that I know of, anyway), the cost of attendance is around 25k/year. I don’t know about others, though, since you and MYOS1634 already mentioned the ones I knew.</p>

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<p>Thank you for the recommendation. I can’t find it anywhere on the QS World University Rankings (under EE) though. Am I missing something or is the ranking not very reliable to begin with?</p>

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<p>^ Can’t edit above post.</p>

<p>Realised that it’s not on the QS Ranking because it doesn’t offer PhD level education.
Still, according to Payscale the 75’th percentile for SAT’s at Cal Poly is 1320.
That can’t be too good, can it?</p>

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<p>I cannot help with a lot of the issues you have posted, I don’t have any experience with them. However, as far as engineering schools go, Cal Poly is a legitimate option (with notoriously low SAT scores).
I believe that I can create three main tiers of schools for Engineering within the US.</p>

<p>The top tier consists of very expensive, selective colleges. These include MIT and Stanford. Although these colleges are good at accepting people who have exceptional commitment to activities and writing styles with mediocre test scores, in most cases they require near perfect SAT/ACT scores.</p>

<p>The next tier consists of mostly state schools such as UCLA, UCSD, University of Colorado Boulder, California Institute of Technology, etc. These are fairly selective and tend to appear in the top 100 lists of best undergraduate colleges in the world, but on the lower side. You can find information about the selectivity online, such as here: [UCLA</a> Admissions: SAT Scores, Financial Aid & More](<a href=“http://collegeapps.about.com/od/collegeprofiles/p/UCLA_Profile.htm]UCLA”>UCLA: Acceptance Rate, SAT/ACT Scores, GPA)</p>

<p>And then the bottom tier will consist of lower level state schools. For an IB student from Sweden, a country with exceptional high school education compared to the US, these should be safe colleges but still ones to look at, such as California State University at Long Beach.</p>

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<p>Success7: CalPoly actually is a very good school, but unless you can pay for it it’s pointless to look at it. Like all publics in CA, it does not offer aid to internationals.
For Americans, it’s an excellent safety if you are “CalTech” caliber and an excellent choice if CalTech is a reach (i.e., for virtually all California applicants - CalPoly is as competitive as a UC to get into.)
The QS rankings are pointless for undergraduate education since they rate universities based on their graduate level (research) programs. Many of the most selective programs in the US focus exclusively on undergraduates and therefore don’t appear on the rankings (ie. Swarthmore, Middlebury, Pomona…)</p>

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<p>Thanks for the advice. Found a lot more good universities now that I looked for options outside of the graduate universities.</p>

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<p>For Cal Poly, 1320 is out of 1600 SAT score only. Not sure if you know. And Cal Poly engineering is very good, their average admission GPA is 4.01 and ACT 31, SAT 1388. </p>

<p>But if you are primarily considering Stanford and the Ivies level schools, then you should add Harvey Mudd, and Cooper Union (tuition free).</p>

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<p>To improve on the SAT english portion, just read extensively. 20 months - that is a lot of time. Read anything. Read NYTimes, read BBC. Watch BBC! You will absorb new words and learn to detect what sentences are efficient and correct. Of course, practice too.</p>

<p>The schools you are planning to apply to are really top-notch schools. It is difficult for people to get into even one of them. If you can pay 25k-30k, as suggested above, try small liberal arts colleges like Bucknell, Lafayette (maybe Swarthmore too but that’s as competitive as an ivy league school.) Additionally, you should apply to Northwestern, Northeastern (merit aid only - so you have to be good), Washington Uni in St Louis, Vanderbilt. However, you can choose to simply study science in college and do well and get a master’s/PhD in engineering (fully funded by a university). If you go through that route, you have a LOT more options and you will have the opportunity to become a more interesting person by being knowledgeable about lots of things. Franklin and Marshall, Trinity College (it has engineering though!), University of Richmond, Bates, Macalester, Grinnell all are great options. Though I think it fair to warn you to avoid 3:2 programs because they don’t have much aid.</p>