I’m a junior in high school who (was) looking at some pretty hard schools. But it turns out I may be picking up a few B+'s this year, which is unfortunate. There isn’t really a good reason–I just messed up. My course schedule last year was arguably slightly harder and I pulled A’s without much effort (as well as freshman year, of course.) I don’t have much to say about that. After last year I was ranked 1/329 but I predict I’ll be around 20th this year. Also, I’ve taken the hardest classes available to me at my good high school (not great, but we send plenty of kids to the top 10 schools.)
However, this year I won the NATIONAL competition of a core academic subject (I will not say which, as it would reveal my identity.) I will compete at the international version soon and hopefully win the US something. It’s a really big deal and it perfectly ties together my application because it draws from several of my interests. The point is, you could not fill a walk-in closet with high schoolers who are better than me at this subject, let alone a lecture hall. And no, it’s not something silly like “geology” or “herpetology” (two interests of mine, actually.) It is a very core subject with its own major as well as many sub-majors.
Other background information: I have a sweet personal narrative as well as other great accomplishments (scoring well on AIME, etc.) which show a handful of serious passions. I’m also a committed athlete (read: captain), though I’m not really recruitable in anything. I think I will surprise my interviewers because I’m funny and have an aura of thoughtful confidence and composure, despite my geeky interests and achievements. I’m white, middle class, and live in an extremely average area (southeastern Virginia.) I haven’t taken any standardized tests but I know I’ll do very well just from practice tests and such. I have good recs, maybe even great.
I just wonder about my grades. Ironically, I think I have a better chance at a place like Harvard where they read the application front-to-back as opposed to quickly eyeing grades/scores like my state school (UVA–although I actually won a math competition there yesterday, haha.) What do you think? This is not a “chance me” thread, I just want to learn about how top colleges tend to act in situations like this, using myself as an example.
Why are you almost at the end of your junior year with no standardized test scores yet? Not even PSAT?
@VickiSoCal 1470 PSAT, but I can do a lot better now so I didn’t feel like mentioning it. Besides, it was short of the NMSQT cutoff for Virginia.
If I were a USAMO winner last year and aced the TST I’d feel be feeling pretty good about my chances at HYP. Not saying this is you, but just saying…
All of your credentials and accomplishments will taken into consideration in their totality. If the reason for your GPA decrease is directly connected to your other accomplishments such as winning math olympiad, then the fall will be viewed more favorably. However, the top schools will have many applicants who have won major international competitions such as Math Olympiad AND be ranked top 5 and have near perfect ACT/SAT scores. Also, they aim to create a diverse entry freshman class each year and so the same credentials from an applicant one year might result in an admit that year but in a different year, could result in a rejection depending on the competing applicants in those particular years. It’s really unfortunate that so many high achieving applicants are rejected each year.
I have known math olympiad winners and sports team captains who were rejected by the top schools such as Ivy League and Williams/Amherst despite having straight A’s, rank in top 3 in STEM magnet schools and near perfect ACT SAT scores of 35-36 and 2360-90 in old SAT. The good news is that they went on to great schools, are doing well and some have gone on to great first jobs out of college.
Just curious, @PeaceOfMind, have you ever encountered USAMO winners or IMO participants (the international stage of the competition) who have been rejected from any Ivy or Williams/Amherst? Not saying it doesn’t happen, and I have heard anecdotally of one IMO participant who was rejected, but I have never personally seen it (and I have either known or known of a number of USAMO winners over the years).
There are only 12 USAMO winners in any given year, and only 6 IMO participants, at least for the USA team, and even with overlap because of the years and some repeats (IMO participants will almost always have been USAMO winners, and it’s rare that a sophomore winner doesn’t repeat for junior year, etc.), I can’t imagine there are more than 15 or so of these kids in the entire college applicant pool in any given year (not including foreign IMO kids of course).
Again, not saying that that is the case with the OP, but if s/he is IMO this year, a few B+'s are not going to matter in my opinion, especially with that profile (top 5ish% of class, athlete, non-Asian, more than high enough verbal scores, etc.).
Just following up, I checked where the 6 USA 2015 IMO participants are currently studying - 3 are at MIT and 3 are at Harvard. Frankly, I seriously doubt whether anyone really even read their applications past “IMO Gold” before admitting.
@SatchelSF I’m very familiar with the IMO/USAMO process (since I’m a WOOTer and spend hours solving problems from those olympiads) and I’d personally say that my recent win is, in terms of difficulty, ~slightly~ less “hard” than qualifying for AMO. It took a good deal of natural talent, four or five years of studying/practicing, mastery of a several skills, and some luck in order to perform at that level and beat out certain other people (that process ties into my whole narrative.) But I still think it’s harder to make AMO. That being said, even the very best colleges don’t necessarily know what goes on behind the scenes with these kinds of competitions and in their eyes a US champion in my particular area may seem as prestigious as USAMO Honorable Mention or even winning USAMO, especially if I can get recognition at the international olympiad against students from 50+ countries. I think it’s even cooler because HYPSM colleges get tons of high-level math enthusiasts but my talent is much more unique, which helps me stand out even more as opposed to being just “another USAMO guy who thinks he’s all that”.
Awesome @eat sleep math, that sounds great! If your award is a little less difficult than qualifying USAMO, admission is of course definitely not a lock (as it would be for IMO and perhaps even for USAMO winners), but you still sound like a terrific candidate. You are right that these schools know the USAMO world very well, and are probably getting jaded with the “typical” USAMO guy (huge lol in recognition that most people have no idea what it takes in terms of talent and preparation to even get to that level).
I hope that your accomplishment is accorded at least the same weight as USAMO qualification. Speaking frankly, high GPA + high AIME + athlete + anticipated high SAT (1550+ should be pretty easy for high AIME people with a little prep) + non-Asian should be a big help. I’ll reiterate that I don’t think a few B+'s will kill your chances, but all you can do is give it your all! Best of luck!
@PeaceOfMind The grade drop was utterly unrelated to my extracurriculars. I can handle my classes just fine (actually APUSH is sort of a struggle) but in MV/linear algebra and college physics, my test average is 99 and ~97, respectively. The problem is that I hate busywork and I drag my feet doing anything where I don’t feel like my efforts are productive and I randomly had a bad third quarter. I also take glee in “clutching” grades, dropping them to the point of doom and then magically recovering to 0.1% above my goal. This “calculated laziness” is a flaw of mine, just to be clear—I’m not bragging. But this year, I don’t think I’ll be so lucky. ;(
Thank you @SatchelSF! What’s the basis of your belief that schools won’t instantly sort me into a likely-reject pile? If I were a Harvard admissions officer right now, I’d be pretty fed up by the thousands of bad applications that are sent simply because of Harvard’s recent resurgence into public fascination (Lil Pump, Danielle Bregoli, etc.) so I’d want to have that kind of pile.
Sorry if that was incoherent.
@ eat sleep math - I definitely don’t want to give you a false sense of hope, but a few things stand out in your profile to me. There are not going to be more than about 1000 non-Asian AIME qualifiers in any given year, and a high score there will get some notice. You’re still well within top 10% of high school class, even with a few “bad grades,” have athletic accomplishments, national recognition in something that is pretty tough (taking your word that it’s only slightly less tough than USAMO qualification - and there are only about 250 USAMO qualifiers in any given year, maybe 60 non-Asian?), other scores should be fine, and you seem balanced between math and verbal. (I’ll assume that you got a 710 verbal in PSAT, because if you got less than 760 on math with a prior AIME qualification, you really “winged it”, lol!)
You have to be right about the automatic reject pile at Harvard and similar (I’m way too old to know about Ms. Bregoli and Mr. Pump, but looking them up was good for a laugh). But I can’t see you on that pile. Michelle Hernandez in her “A for Admission” book maybe twenty years ago talked about how roughly 40-50% of Dartmouth applicants were essentially “instant rejects” on the basis of having only an academic score of 3 or less on Dartmouth’s then 9 point scale. I have to imagine that with the increase in applications over the past two decades (with no reason to believe there has been any real improvement in the quality of the applicant pool), that pile must be even larger! But again, despite what people on here will tell you, these schools do not have “thousands of perfect stats” kids to choose from, maybe hundreds. Best of luck!
Might be worth noting that IMO qualification is essentially an auto-admit for Cambridge (or Oxford) math too, and they really don’t care about your HS grades at all. In fact they don’t care about anything but math ability.
https://share.trin.cam.ac.uk/sites/public/Alumni/The_Fountain_Issue_19.pdf
Try some STEP-2 & 3 papers (https://www.maths.cam.ac.uk/undergrad/admissions/step). If you can do those then you should be well placed, assuming financial aid is not a factor (there isn’t any for international students).
@Twoin18 Cool! Those are some really awesome questions. My parents make less than $200k, though, so Cambridge is out of the question for me. At the international competition I’m going to, people who do well often automatically get into the top schools in Europe (or at least in their home country.) I think the reason American schools are less willing to credit competition performance is their acute wariness of the surplus of competition opportunities in America (everyone’s a winner.) I believe the reason we have so many spots for “winners” is that it’s the only way to foster the stereotypically-American belief among many students that they’re “high-achieving”. Our national ego would be small if we could only instill this sense in our legitimate best students.
@Eatsleepmath I like you and your style…will you be at harvard year after next? Who knows…complete crapshoot (based on 3 years being here) but you’re going to be somewhere great and will add value to that school. Enjoy this last year of high school!
An income close to $200K would make you full pay at most top schools, unless you have siblings in college. In that case Cambridge would be cheaper: roughly $50K per year and three years instead of four. Run the NPC for your target schools before ruling it out on the grounds of cost.
^ Yeah, I though the “no talent” part was a little mean, on reflection, so I edited it out prior to the comment. But those scores? Really, a typical American middle school team in the San Francisco Bay Area would do better. Much better.
IMO selection processes differ dramatically from country to country.
@Twoin18 My parents are divorced, which I think means that number is more like 25-30k for most schools when you do the math. @SouthernHope Thanks! I thought I came off as pretentious, but sometimes it can’t be helped on CC. Thankfully, I’m not in real life. In fact, like I said, I’m very happy with my character and I think it will be striking for interviewers.
Run the NPC. Private colleges require details of both parents’ incomes via the CSS Profile. Many people don’t find out until it’s too late that a dream college is unaffordable.