languages + chances at Chicago

Colleges & Universities University of Chicago
1

<p>Hi to all in frozen Chicago,</p>

<p>I’m a junior this year, but I’m in some pretty unusual circumstances and thought it would be wise to start asking about chances early.</p>

<p>Personal:
White F
Arizona (49th in the nation in education, at least we beat Mississippi)
CHARTER SCHOOL (this is unusual, see note below)
Class size: 50-55
Sends 0-1 to Ivies per class, 10-12 to good SLACs</p>

<p>*My HS is a very small charter school basically meant to imitate the curriculum of a place like St. John’s, or the Core of schools like Chicago, Columbia, etc. Every course except languages is mandatory (language you pick in 8th grade). Average SAT is about 1250-1280 (without writing). Every core class is labeled honors but there are no APs. See below. The school profile explains everything in extreme detail, so I doubt there will be any confusion for committees.</p>

<p>To illustrate this, junior year classes:
Precalc + first semester calc
Classical Greek (my 3rd year)
Physics E&M
Studio Art (1 semester), Drama (other)
History & literature seminar: classics in translation (2 hours daily)</p>

<p>Senior year classes:
Calc BC
Classical Greek (4th year)
Chemistry
Studio Art (1 semester), Drama (other)
History & literature seminar: medieval authors in translation (2 hours daily)</p>

<p>Stats and Tests:</p>

<p>GPA: 4.0/4.0</p>

<p>Rank: 1/57 but I share the rank with 2 others</p>

<p>SAT: I took the SAT in 8th grade and got 800v/650m (I knew no geometry). Practice tests all 2380-2400 (obviously no essay).</p>

<p>SAT II: have Bio E 800, Lit 800, USH 740. Will take Latin, Math IIC, World History. Predict 3x800.</p>

<p>ACT: not taking, predicted is about 34-35. Should I?</p>

<p>APs: This is where it gets sticky. As mentioned above, my school has no AP courses so I have to whine and complain to other schools & the College Board in order to take exams.</p>

<p>This year:
Latin Vergil
Latin Lit (doing both supervised study, which was hell to arrange)
Physics C E&M (may take B instead)
US G&P (took course last year, just reviewing)
English Language
Micro (independent study)</p>

<p>Next year:
English Literature
Comp G&P
Calc BC
Chemistry
German (studied abroad last summer and I read German articles for my research, see below)
Macro (independent study)</p>

<p>Extracurriculars:
Speech and Debate: cocaptain, state finalist, double state championship team, prestigious award as sophomore (one of about 100 sophs nationally)</p>

<p>Cross-country and track: all-region cross, all-region and all-state track, triple state championship track team-- I run 1600, 3200 but want to drop cross and run steeple in college (or possibly 10k). Will captain both senior year.</p>

<p>Junior Classical League: president, very very numerous awards (see below)
Violin (six years, school has no orchestra so I take lessons)
College level Greek since 9th grade
Regional Science Bowl</p>

<p>Service:
About 150 hours peer tutoring in Latin and math (total)
About 50 hours volunteering cross and track meets (jr. high)
Write, organize, direct children’s Nativity play yearly- total 60 hours?
About 100-150 hours translating Greek tragedy for production I will direct and possibly perform in–play will be in Greek but audience will have my translation as “subtitles” (this is difficult to understand without seeing the setup)</p>

<p>Summer:
2xJHU-CTY (Greek and history of disease)
Study abroad in Austria
Debate camp (not prestigious)</p>

<p>I am applying to TASP and a non-pay-based study abroad program this year–will likely go to Macedonia because I really want to learn Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian. If I get neither, I will volunteer or work and take an intensive language course (in BCS of course).</p>

<p>Awards:
National Forensic League Outstanding Distinction (as soph, see above)
Won two local history/civics type essay contests
National Latin Exam 4xsumma, 2 perfect papers
Top 10 nationally on CAMWS unseen Latin contest
3x state JCL certamen champion, 1 second place (7th grade)
23x state champion in other JCL events (not a typo, seriously 23 times)
5x second place other JCL events</p>

<p>Research etc:
Work on tragedy mentioned above
National History Day paper (end of Peloponnesian War vs. Reconstruction, specifically about the Thirty Tyrants compared to Benjamin Butler if anyone knows classics)
Way too in-depth paper for the Concord Review about Makedonian politics before Alexander the Great (taking me forever and a day but fortunately they have rolling submissions)</p>

<p>As you can tell, I definitely, definitely will major in classics. As such, I would love it if anyone could</p>

<p>a) share their experience with languages (particularly classics if anyone has taken courses)</p>

<p>and, of course, b) chance me!</p>

2

<p>I don’t study Classical Studies, but I am in a related program. Chicago seems to be very good in it, and I have heard that Greek is very challenging here. Katharos has experience with Greek at Chicago, if she is still around.</p>

3

<ol>
<li><p>As a parent, I get a little upset when students with credentials like these post them and ask their chances. It is a little mean to others, and definitely raises the anxiety level. You don’t – or at least shouldn’t – need anyone here to tell you that you will be a competitive applicant anywhere you apply if you keep on this track. I make allowances for your age, but you maybe should tone it down a notch. Or ten.</p></li>
<li><p>Use your time to figure out exactly what you want in a university. If you have a precise idea and can communicate it, chances are that’s what you’ll get to do.</p></li>
<li><p>Do not use your time worrying about whether your high school is weird or unknown. You have plenty of external validation for the quality of your work. You do not need to take all those APs unless you plan to go to a college that will give you credit for them, and you want to graduate in three years or fewer. Chances are, that’s not what you want. If you think it is what you want, and it’s for economic reasons, you should probably be paying a lot of attention to Harvard’s new financial aid initiative (which will likely spread to its main competitors, but not Chicago unfortunately, before you apply). </p></li>
<li><p>Since you are not going to do anything interesting in Classics without a graduate degree, one of the things you might think about doing is talking to people in good graduate programs about what you should do and where as an undergraduate.</p></li>
<li><p>Among my kids’ close friends, I know three kids with interests like yours. One was the top student in her class at a well-known private school. She is at Yale and is not, I think, studying classics. She was accepted EA and never applied anywhere else. The other two were more unbalanced students – very strong (your level, although not necessarily your energy) in Latin and Greek, but perfectly willing to take Cs in subjects that didn’t interest them. One is at Chicago and loving it, very engaged. The other is at Toronto, and she loves it there, too. She really has interests like yours – she is studying Serbo-Croatian now (and also German).</p></li>
</ol>

4

<p>JHS, </p>

<p>While I agree with some of your sentiments, I would give philoglossia a bit of a break. Sure, it is ridiculous to ask what her chances are when she got 800 on the verbal portion of the SAT in 8th grade, and has a 5-page long “wrap sheet” by the age of 16. This surely was not the case when I was a teen 30 years ago, but teens nowadays have insecurities that are both funny (to us adults) and troubling at the same time. </p>

<p>I have to raise an eyebrow every time I see credentials such as this one, and ask myself — is this really healthy for our kids? When I was that age, I did NOTHING outside of school, was rather average in class, had never won ANY award (even a minor one), and very much enjoyed sampling the vices of youth. It was not until college that I developed certain passions and interests and rose to the top of tier of my class. The funny thing is that looking back at my classmates from that time, those that have been most successful as adults were completely unremarkable in high school.</p>

5

<p>I’m sure philoglossia knows she has a great shot at Chicago or any other school, but it’s nice to have reassurances. Besides, what do people expect when they click on a chances thread? If you can’t handle the heat, get out of the kitchen. ;)</p>

<p>

I don’t have any direct experience with Chicago’s program, but it’s obviously one of the best out there. With advanced Latin and three years of Attic under your belt, you need a university that offers graduate courses in Greek (Bryn Mawr is an exception), and Chicago fits that very nicely. I’m usually a little hesitant to recommend Chicago to protential Classics majors because their program focuses almost exclusively on philology, but I suspect that would fit you rather well.</p>

<p>Chicago is also one of the few universities to offer East European languages.
<a href=“http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/pdf_08/SLAV.pdf[/url]”>http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/pdf_08/SLAV.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

6

<p>I have a friend who is a language-focused classics major and she loves the rigor of education she’s getting as well as the opportunities to do research with professors. She has a job as a research assistant and she mentioned that if she doesn’t get into grad school (she’s looking for a very particular program in a very particular language) she’d be happy to just continue her research job full-time.</p>

<p>Chicago offers so many random languages. Uzbek? Akkadian? Old Church Slavonic?</p>

7

<p>Hey what’s up:</p>

<p>The Classics department at UC is fantastic. I know a few classics professors and they are so incredible - my HUM professor last quarter is a classics/linguistics professor and she is so brilliant and such a great teacher. That’s all I can say about the department, but if she’s any indication of how the teaching is in Classics, I would definitely say you’d be in good hands in that department.</p>

8

<p>(My daughter and I share our CC name due to a registration overlapping snafu, so this post is from a parent.) I echo JHS’s sentiments, and wondered at first if philoglossia could honestly be asking for “chances”! Of course your chances are excellent, but you probably already know that and are looking for reassurance. I agree, too, with GroovyGeek’s concern about this being “healthy”. However, it sounds like philo genuinely loves what she studies, and her numerous and impressive awards are a natural result of intense involvement and vast knowledge base. I’ll let the UChicago experts speak to the language/classics question.</p>

<p>Two cents: Times have changed so much. Even among the best students at my top ranked high school, kids were kids. We hung out with each other, participated in sports or music, whatever we liked. A few were driven, but it didn’t take as much to land a spot at a top university back then. Whew, these young folks have become so competitive and pressured. The bar has been raised just about as far as it can go. None of my friends, all of whom have achieved strong success in varied fields, were accomplished at the tender age of 16 or 17! We matured and grew into our interests, which often still changed as life lead us in different directions. Just my two cents.</p>

9

<p>Sorry. I meant “led” not “lead” in my second to last sentence. Caffeine hasn’t kicked in yet.</p>

10

<p>je<em>ne</em>sais_quoi, I agree that the bar for getting into a “top 10” school has been raised incredibly, but the thing that is overlooked is that the quality of education at virtually every university has gone up with it, so “ending up” at Tufts, NYU, UCSD, or UW instead of Chicago or Columbia has little bearing on the quality of education one receives. It is still up to the kid to make the most out of their experience rather than anything the school does. There have been interesting studies published that followed the careers of Ivy Leaguers and kids that were accepted by Ivy League schools but chose not to attend for a variety of reasons. There was no statistical difference in success, at least as measured by a number of semi-objective measures such as earnings, promotion rate in the chosen field, etc. My own life experience was similar, I have detailed it elsewhere on CC if you care to look, so I will not repeat it here (though I would have never been able to get accepted into a “top 10” school, either then or now).</p>

11

<p>JHS and GroovyGeek, and je ne sais quoi too:</p>

<p>I think a lot of parents and counselors get needlessly alarmed when they see the lists of activities etc. that competitive students have. Because of my interests and the way that I’ve spent my time on them, my experience is different from that of most competitive people, but this is what I have to say: ** Every activity I do, I honestly love.** Nothing in my r</p>

12

<p>I do not think you should consider Chicago if you know the core is not right for you. It’s not worth your time or your money, and it’s a third of your undergraduate experience. The students I know at Chicago either like the idea of a core and would implement a “core” even if there wasn’t one (me), or think that a core might be a painful experience, but a worthwhile one at that (most students).</p>

<p>I’m not an expert on your field, but the University of Michigan might have the resources you are looking for, plus a strong undergraduate student body. I also think that Michigan has been trying to boost their Classics programs (at least that’s the impression I got when one of my friends, a prospective classics major, was offered a full ride).</p>

13

<p>philoglossia: How about keeping this in mind too – people like you who dislike the Core and consider Chicago make people like me who don’t have a list of credentials five miles long (but still like the Core nonetheless) look ever-so-slightly, ah, lame. And, for the record, I was just admitted EA. I’m of the opinion that the merit awards are there for people who would thrive at the school, not people who would slog through the Core and hate on the Classics dept. in complete misery. If you want to get money, then at least get money from schools where you’re a better fit.</p>

<p>Also, please don’t even bother asking whether you should take the ACT or not. Even your eighth grade SAT scores are good enough to send.</p>

<p>I seriously have to stop wandering into these chances threads.</p>

14

<p>philog:</p>

<p>You are welcome to feel offended by my slightly-mean comment. But let me make something clear: If I thought you came across as the kind of person who was only achieving because of “the impending doom of college admissions”, I would not have said anything at all, or I would have said something quite different. I think you will be competitive anywhere you apply precisely because, even in this impoverished context, you come across as the real deal. </p>

<p>I think you should tone it down in public postings out of noblesse oblige, not because you look desperate. As long as you can deliver the goods, a little arrogance is not such a bad thing at all – when you are dealing with adults, who can admire you without feeling threatened or diminished.</p>

<p>The only thing I have more to add is that on Parents Weekend this year I heard a dynamite lecture by Clifford Ando, who joined the University of Chicago faculty this year, and who is one hell of a historian/classicist.</p>

15

<p>I also went to the Clifford Ando lecture during Parents’ Weekend! Great talk, though he came off as a little pretentious to me. But…let’s face it, a little pretentiousness is not unusual on college campuses, and maybe we’ve found a match with the OP.</p>

<p>Take-home message is that we adults really don’t care for chance threads. Not that our opinions will get us anywhere.</p>