<p>I was expelled in Sophomore year from a military school for insolence and “failure to adapt”. Otherwise, my resume is pretty great.</p>
<p>SAT:
Math: 740
Critical Reading: 760
Writing: 800</p>
<p>Grades:
Weighted: 4.4 GPA
Unweighted: 3.9 GPA</p>
<p>Community Service:
300+ hours</p>
<p>Have done a sport every season
Debate Club President
Talented writer (will probably nail the application essay)</p>
<p>What are my chances even with an expulsion?</p>
<p>Your scores are good enough to be competitive, and I doubt your expulsion from military school will have that large of an effect on your application. Ultimately, whether you are admitted or not will be determined by how well you can sell yourself to the admissions committee. If your application is just a standard application with “great essays” (protrip: everyone thinks they write great essays) and nothing else that’s unique, you won’t have great chances. As such, you can enhance your possibilities of admission to really adding something unique to your application; what that is is up to you.</p>
<p>^I actually had an exceedingly standard application and was accepted in the EA round because of essays…
I don’t know if this goes for everybody (it did for me), but generally if you’re a good fit for the school, you can probably anticipate an acceptance in the EA round, and most likely a waitlist in the RD round (although you might get lucky). I find that Chicago is very holistic in the application process, so if you have a particular weakness and a particular strength they can effectively cancel out. Also: NEVER not apply to a school because you don’t think you have good chances. We had a kid at our school with a 35 ACT who was doing computer science work for a start-up in California, and appeared to be an absolute genius. He got rejected or waitlisted at every highly ranked school he applied to. By contrast, we had a kid with a 1150 SAT (out of 1600), who was accepted to Chicago EA, won a huge national scholarship for college, got into Yale, got into Columbia, and was waitlisted at Harvard, being the only person from our high school who got into more than one highly ranked top school. Stats don’t mean as much as people lead others on to believe, so if you like the school, just apply. The absolute worst that happens is you get a rejection.</p>