<p>First off thank you for taking the time to read this and maybe help me out. I live in Melbourne, Australia and I’ve had somewhat of a messy education. I was put into an accelerated course where I went from year 6 at the end of one year and passed year 8 the next. From then onwards, I underperformed until leaving High School at the end of Year 12 in 2008.</p>
<p>I was accepted into University in Australia for Advertising Design and deferred my enrollment till this year, and am commencing studies on the 1st of March.</p>
<p>For the previous year (my gap year between High School and Uni), I ran my own advertising boutique. This was a business that I was keen to work on for the rest of the year, however due to competition from other design agencies and lack of clients I decided to close the business.</p>
<p>For the rest of the year I worked on developing an idea of mine into an internet startup, and am on the verge of launching at the moment. This is more for my experience than aiming for sellout success, I am interested in further education more than this project.</p>
<p>So somewhere along the way I found myself more interested in Computer Science. I have been programming since I was 8 or 9, but treated it more as a hobby until the previous year. For those like-minded, I am competent in PHP and Ruby whilst learning Lisp with plans to also learn Python and C in the near future.</p>
<p>I am very entrepreneurially minded and have various interests that I’ll quickly list.</p>
<p>Computer Science: Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering and Research.
Economics: Game Theory, Quantitative Analysis
Arts: Advertising, Marketing, Design, Piano, Guitar and Singing
Sports: Bodybuilding, Powerlifting</p>
<p>I have aspirations to undertake research in artificial intelligence and quantitative analysis, so I am looking to enter college as an international student in 2011. I have the following planned for completion this year to aid my application:</p>
<p>SAT and Maths 2, Biology and Physics Subject Tests.
May do ACT as well, unsure of advantages (if any?) of doing both SAT and ACT?</p>
<p>AP Computer Science A, Statistic Exams</p>
<p>Assist with Open Source development of both Ruby and Common Lisp (Programming Languages)</p>
<p>Conduct preliminary research on a Statistical Arbitrage AI Agent that I am developing, planning to submit a manuscript to the ‘IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence’ by the end of the year.</p>
<p>There is one major catch with my application however. I left High School with my Certificate incomplete, but have plans to complete the 3 remaining units by the end of the year. This would place me around the 60-75% score range, due to bad performance in early high school.</p>
<p>So my question is:</p>
<p>What are my chances of admission into a near-top college, whilst I have well developed interests, experience and (hopefully by the end of this year) research?</p>
<p>If I am simply shooting too high by going for a near-top college, please point my in the right direction considering my lower high school performance.</p>
<p>Thank you so much for your time, I plan on becoming very active in the College Confidential community.</p>
It’s amazing to hear that I may have a chance at these schools, I’ve still got the rest of the year to make that chance as firm as possible. Definitely got a lot to do.</p>