Help Me Find Match/Reaches?

College Search & Lists
1

<p>GPA: 4.9 W, 4.0 U
SAT: 2280
ACT: 35</p>

<p>Senior Course Load:
Multivariable Calc
Ap Gov/Econ
Ap Macroecon
Ap comp sci
ap eng lit
ap physics c *edeeet: its both electrical and mech in the same year</p>

<p>APs taken: Bio(5), Chem(5), Calc Ab(5), Bc(5), Physics 1(5), physics 2(4), ap english lang(5), world(5), APUSH(4), Psych(5)
My tests from this year have their scores projected based on how hard I thought the test was.</p>

<p>EC’s:
Started a monarch butterfly sanctuary/restoration society: president freshmen year, founder, and chairman of the board for three years (including next)</p>

<p>Started SafeRides at my school which is a club that keeps partying kids off the street and is widely publicized: founder sophmore year, president for three years</p>

<p>Started the debate club freshmen year, president for four years, won a few awards</p>

<p>Varsity tennis for three years (starting sophmore), scholar athlete with distinction for four years, captain next year</p>

<p>Write a blog about software development with about 100 views/day and active discussions</p>

<p>Developed three ios apps grossing over 30k in two years</p>

<p>Published in an undergrad research journal for my work in heuristic malware detection</p>

<p>Placed first in the math and software division at my school three years in a row, won the California state science fair twice for math and software, honorable mention at Intel this past year.</p>

<p>Placed as a semifinalist in the Google scifair, Siemens, and Intel STS. This was last year, for my work in probabilistic heuristic detection methods.</p>

<p>Own my own encryption/privacy desktop software company that does about 10k/y in gross revenue</p>

<p>Summer after freshmen year went to the USC summer acceleration program for infosec, also taught myself precalc, also took an online class at a local CC for a humanities subject</p>

<p>Summer after sophmore year had a research internship with my local UC in a computer science related field, developed two of the aforementioned apps, became A+ certified in a bunch of disciplines.</p>

<p>This year i have been contracting out for the boutique pc builder Origin and make 40$/h on the weekends making rush-order PCs when most people are off for the weekend. </p>

<p>This summer going to Stanford for AI modeling and also have a research internship at the same UC as the programming guy for a cancer research team. Probably going to keep contracting for Origin as well. </p>

<p>Random stuff: I know c, c++, visual c++, c#, objc, f#, Python, Ruby/RoR, Pearl, ApplScript, Basic, VBS, VBscript, VB.Net, Java, Javascript, CSS, HTML, PHP, and I dabble in other scripting langs like AutoIT.</p>

<p>I’m also on the staff of VirusShare.com as a heuristic analyst, basically I analyze our more interesting samples and catalogue them. </p>

<p>We do our “senior projects” in junior year if we are in ap eng lang and mine was on how our network infrastructure was very vulnerable, got mentioned in some local newspapers and started a “whitehat” hacker recognition list in my school district for people that report vulnerabilities.</p>

<p>There’s some other more minor stuff but that’s about it. Oh and I have volunteered about 500 hours at ThinkTogether, with another 100-150 next year before app submissions.</p>

2

<p>You certainly look like a strong candidate for anywhere to me. There are literally thousands of match/reach schools you could look at. I would suggest you try to narrow down your criteria.</p>

<p>What kind of school do you want to go to–(large, small, Greek presence, sports.) What region of the country? What programs do you want it to have. How much can you afford.</p>

3

<p>Rounding your probability of acceptance to 1 significant figure, and assuming that 0-30% is a reach, 40-90% is a match and 100% is a safety, then I don’t think that there are many schools that are reach for you. I don’t see SAT IIs. </p>

<p>Basically, your reaches are basically the schools with single digit acceptance rates where pretty much anybody can easily get rejected. I would venture as far as to say that MIT is a match (like 40%) given your performance on state and national STEM events. They like that more than the ivies. </p>

<p>Your matches are everything else that isn’t pretty much automatic. </p>

<p>If you are male, then I would put all of the women’s colleges in the reach department (0%). Otherwise, they are all matches. </p>

4

<p>Pretty sure this is trolling lol, there is no one that won semi-finalist in Google Science Fair, Intel STS, AND Siemens in 2013. Plus “probabilistic heuristic detection” is complete nonsense, it doesn’t mean anything. Sounds like someone trying too hard to come up with some BS intelligent-sounding project. No one could possibly do everything listed on here, and even if someone could, they wouldn’t be wasting time with pointless threads on CC.</p>

5

<p>@Kei, not it isn’t a ■■■■■. It’s the basis of malware detection. Heuristics are, in this context, little “peices” of identifying code that doesn’t change even in polymorphic malware. I wrote a scalable bloom filter implementation that increased the speed of ClamAV, and later my own antivirus for use in SMTP relays, by a factor of nearly 2^15. This was achieved with a huge number of optimizations (if you look up “Hash-AV” you should find a Stanford grad student’s paper on one that didn’t hold cache residency, as well as not having a litany of other little things like using hashxx with seeding for increased speed). The reason I won all of that stuff was because of how much time I put into it.</p>

<p>The hueristics part came in where I analyzed about 150k live malware sampled from teamcyru and virusshare.com and compared similar samples to find identical hex-code that was present in every “version” of the malware. This allowed for an implementation of 9600000 bytes of hash-output (what is usually used to lookup based on signatures, or in this case the output of the comparisions) to a 450000 bit bitarray. I implemented a more complex scaling filter, but for basic bloomfilters (a colloquial term for something that allows for VERY efficient lookups) this is a useful resource <a href=“Bloom Filters by Example”>http://billmill.org/bloomfilter-tutorial/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>This is already a gaurenteed reduction in size (and this scales by a tightening ratio of about 0.9 b/c of the scaling filter) of 2^12, and the other exponential speedup comes from only having to perform bitwise operations as opposed to slower “mathematical” operations that most malware scanners use.</p>

<p>Also, I see threads with stuff like kids literally curing cancer, so compared to 25 Ap’s and curing cancer this didn’t really seem like I was “gaurenteed” for any top schools. This is just what I like to do, and it turned out well :/</p>

<p>Edit: oh, and I would like a school with a good computer science program, not to anti-fun, and preferably more west coast. if there is a stellar east coast uni that you think of I’m always open :)</p>

6

<p>Do you have any cost constraints? Is your family able and willing to cover the Expected Family Contribution for an expensive private school? If so, consider selective private schools with top CS programs (especially Stanford since you prefer the West Coast, but also MIT and CMU). Cornell is a little less selective than Stanford or MIT but also has a strong CS department. Consider Harvey Mudd College if you’d prefer a smaller college. These schools all have good need-based financial aid.</p>

<p>Consider in-state public universities as match and safety options. </p>

<p>In case you cannot cover the EFC even at in-state public universities, look for schools with good merit scholarships. The University of Southern California, unlike many other research universities in the USNWR top ~25, is relatively generous with merit scholarships. So is Rice University.</p>

7

<p>Yes, Mudd is a good suggestion. Acceptance rate is only 13% this year, more competitive for male students. It is a reach for everyone, but I would call it a low reach for you.</p>

8

<p>I haven’t heard Caltech mentioned, it should be considered but as a reach school not a match. The rest of the UCs should be matches. But I think you have a very good shot at Stanford. </p>

9

<p>I don’t see any projects as you described in the 2012 or 2013 Intel semifinalist list or Siemens semifinalist list.</p>