I need advice, HS junior, advice [aiming for MIT, CS , MA resident, 4.5 GPA, 3.8 unweighted GPA]

Pre-College Topics High School Life
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Hi, I am a high school junior that wants to go to a T20 or Ivy. I got a 3.8 UW and 4.3 W GPA freshman year and sophomore year, and I’m disappointed with my sophomore performance but I am on track for a 5.1 this year if I lock in on math. I have a 87 as of now and am unsure why I am doing so badly. I come from an upper-middle-class family, and my dad gets paid around $200k a year, so we’re doing pretty well financially. I’m not sure how much aid I’ll get, but I plan to do ROTC to get money or take on a little debt. I am dropping sports because of medical reasons along with being super busy, at least the winter and fall seasons. I am still very fit and do calisthenics . I got a 4 on AP Bio and was disappointed but am taking APUSH AP STATS AP LANG AND AP CSP and Physics honors and Math honors right now and am doing super great in all but math honors. I will either take AP calc AB or BC depending on scheduling next year and preferably BC. I’m applying to about 20 programs since they’re all super competitive.

I work about 18 hours a week at my local grocery store. I also am head of my JROTC unit and am the head of a robotics team that placed top 50 in internationals, which is solid for a sophomore (it was last year). I’m a Boy Scout and am working on an eagle scout project I am actually passionate about. Last year, I was staff at 2 different camps, a Boy Scouts one and a JROTC one along with helping raise 10k for 2 nonprofits as part of a philanthropy program I did in my county. I am leading a satellite design time with some friends and applying for NHS this year along with working on selling some of my custom designed electronics and working on repair work under my business moor performance, website coming soon. I am also managing my local senior communities website along with an eagle scout project website and some other small sites for community service. I am getting mentored every other weekend at MIT from the future society of engineers at MIT and I hope to help out with that or get something out of it more like an ambassador to other high schools for outreach or something. I am going to try and do USACO this year and place decently well along with working on my projects more and get involved in research based on them if I can.

I took the PSAT and got a 1430 which means i get a commended score and a sick award but not NM which is fire honestly because thats super hard in my state. I plan on taking every spring SAT until I get a 1530 plus.

I live in Massachusetts and I’m Latino. My mom has only a high school degree and is a first-generation immigrant. My dad went to William & Mary, which is a good school, but he doesn’t know much about admissions since he only applied to one place.

I really want to go to MIT, I love the atmosphere and the people and the spirit and the campus and everything about it but understand its a crap shoot.

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A lot of people want a lot of things. You can try but don’t forget - there is no perfect school. They all have flaws. Bad profs, roomies, food, etc.

If interested in MIT, you might also look at RPI. When you say MIT and Ivies, that tells me you haven’t really defined what you want in a school vs a name you think is big.

You want to find the right school for you vs just a big name school. Have you visited any ?

You have an outstanding OOS record. Congrats. But yes, you need to lock in on math, especially for top schools. I’m less concerned with your grades and more about learning the material as math goes up quickly and you have to know it.

MIT or UMASS (not an assured admit), life can be great. You will make your success.

Just ensure you have an assure school on your list.

Best of luck.

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Fine to take your shot but you really need to expand your horizons. MIT has an acceptance rate under 5% and routinely reject students with perfect GPAs and standardized tests.

IMO the whole concept of a hyper-competitive “dream school” is a terrible idea. There are tons of amazing colleges and universities where you can have a great four year experience and get where you want to go in life.

Consider why you like the school you mentioned other than being a “big name” and do the work to find a group of excellent but less competitive schools which have similar attributes.

In addition, focus on affordability. The loans you can take out as a student are limited and ROTC scholarships are competitive.

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I am wondering whether you might have jumped ahead in math. Math is an area where what you learn today is based on what you learned last year and the year before, and what you are going to be learning next year is based on what you are learning now. You want to make sure that you understand each step solidly before you go ahead to the next step. Jumping ahead in math usually does not come out well. Math is also an area where you need to understand the concepts. Definitely do not just try to apply formulae.

By the way I have a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from MIT that I earned a very long time ago. MIT is full of students who remember the one time that they got an A in math rather than their normal A+, or who remember the low A+ that they got rather than their normal high A+. These students still find MIT to be very challenging. MIT is a lot of work and the desire to work that hard needs to come from inside you, the student. MIT is not a good fit for every very strong student.

With a math degree from MIT my first full time job involved application of math and software to problems that needed computers to solve. In some cases we were using canned software programs to solve problems, and coming up with results that really did not look right. Someone (meaning the math guy, meaning me) had to figure out what was going wrong. I looked at what math the software was using and why it did not fit our problem. This was definitely an example where understanding the concepts was critical, and just understanding the formulae would not have helped at all (the programs were applying formulae correctly, they just weren’t using quite the right formulae for the problem that we were trying to solve).

Working 18 hours per week in a grocery store is a lot to do alongside high school and multiple AP classes plus filling out university applications and taking standardized tests. One of the key skills in life is to find things to NOT do. There are lots of things that we want to do. We each need to figure out what the priority is and focus our efforts. Working a job is by the way a good EC (as is robotics), and if you spend a lot of time working a job you might as one option think about reducing time spent on other ECs.

And yes, Massachusetts is a tough state for the national merit exam.

And @tsbna44 is entirely correct that there is no perfect school. There are plusses and minuses of every school. Finding a university that is a good fit for you is very important. Attending a highly ranked university is not.

When I see someone say “Top 20 or Ivy” I get nervous. One reason that I get nervous is that the top 20 universities and Ivy League schools are not all the same. They are not all going to be a good fit for any one particular strong student. You should be thinking about which schools would be a good fit for you. Also, if you are at some point interested in any graduate program, in general the students at the highest ranked graduate programs come from a huge range of undergraduate colleges and universities, and definitely not just from “top 20” nor even “top 50” schools. I have also found consistently throughout my career that graduates from highly ranked universities routinely work alongside graduates from a huge range of schools and in most cases no one cares where anyone got their degree(s).

And the other reason that “top 20 or Ivy” makes me nervous is that none of them are safeties for pretty nearly any student. You definitely also need to be finding safeties to apply to that you would be happy attending.

And only do ROTC if you want to serve in the military.

Best wishes.

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It is essential that you find a sure thing for admission, that you like, that is affordable. I will suggest UMass-Amherst which has excellent programs in your intended majors, and will likely be affordable for your family. I’m not sure it’s a sure thing…but apply in the early round to maximize your chances.

Please read this thread I am going to link. The student in this thread was a NMF, top HS student, excellent course rigor, excellent LOR and essays, excellent ECs. No one expected he would be rejected everywhere he applied his senior year of high school, but that is what happened. He did land well on his feet…after a well crafted gap year. But his senior year in high school was not a happy time. You don’t want to be in the same position. It’s an old thread…but admissions have become more competitive.

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So it is premature at this point to assess exactly where it will make sense for you to apply. Keep doing your reasonable best in your classes, same with the SAT, make sure to leave time for your most valued activities as well as your social, emotional, physical, and ethical development, and next summer/early fall we can help you understand your general competitiveness.

I would also suggest you devote some additional time now to exploring all the many different great college options in the US. If you can visit a reasonable sampling of schools in person, even just locally (there are certainly a lot in MA), you may find that helpful in terms of helping you focus on what really matters most to you. You can definitely explore them online as well, digging into things like departmental pages, activities pages, scholarship pages, and so on.

Again if you would like help generating leads to explore, this community is great for that. Like if you explain more abut what you like about MIT, we can help you find more colleges to explore that have at least some similar strengths. It can help if you give us an idea of your budget, which is a conversation you should be having with your parents.

I’m confident if you do your reasonable best academically, keep developing holistically, and then explore your college options with an open mind, you will end up with a well-balanced list of colleges that all make a lot of sense for you in light of your academic interests, budget as relevant, and other preferences and goals for a four-year college experience. Then you should end up with multiple interesting offers to consider, and you can choose the offer you find most exciting, and you are off to college.

As a final thought, many people here don’t think much of generic lists like “T20” or “Ivy”. That includes me. It is possible that a great list for you will include some such colleges. I doubt it will include all of them, and it will definitely include a lot of other colleges not on those lists. To be very blunt, I think people use those sorts of generic lists because they just don’t know that much about colleges in the US, and they lean on such lists to try to simplify things.

Fortunately, with the help of communities like this one, you have plenty of time to learn everything you will need to know to have a much more sophisticated list, one that actually makes sense for you as an individual. And not only does that prevent you from wasting time applying to colleges that don’t make sense for you, and missing great colleges that do make sense for you, it also means when it comes time to do things like write “Why us?” essays, you are not going to be one of the kids who doesn’t know what to say, or feels like they have to try to make up something the college wants to hear. You’ll already have a great answer ready to go, because your process will have been about that sort of reflection all along.