Please tell me my chances for Stanford, Pomona, CMC, Haverford, Emory or Yale!

Chance Me / Match Me
1

Hi! was over on reddit at r/chanceme looking for advice and couldn’t find any. Hoping anyone can let me know their thoughts on my odds for the above schools. Here’s most of the important information:

Academics:
GPA: 94.9% (converts to a 4.0 for my school)
Class Rank: My school doesn’t track it officially but my counselor privately told me I was #1 this semester
SAT: Planning on retaking in October and aiming for 1500+ (in range of my practice) despite having a really bad day the first time and getting 1430
SAT II: 730 USH, 740 Literature (I know these aren’t great, but I was told it’s not worth retaking. Should I?)
APs: Waiting to hear about my 3 this year (APUSH, Lang&Comp, Capstone). Don’t have any before that because I moved from a non-AP school. Next year taking 4: Research, 2D Design, English Lit, and Calculus

Major Achievements/Extracurriculars/Experiences:
•I wrote and published a book at the age of 12—spent three years writing an editing, and as a result did several talks at schools/signings.
•Started a charity which raised over a thousand dollars for charity over its six month run.
•Secretary General of my school’s MUN, which hosts the largest conference in our country. Chaired and participated in many conferences.
•Heavy involvement in student council every year since middle school, including Co-Head this year and School Secretary previously.
•Organizer of annual school Poetry Night
•member of various service groups including NHS. Was in charge of one. Handed out food to the homeless every week as part of a community project.
•Worked on several short film sets, including at Interlochen Arts Academy. Was hired to work on a feature film set this summer.
•Wrote a feature film screenplay and currently completing a collection of poetry I hope to self-publish.
•Counselor for local Jewish Scouts
•Sports: Cross Country team captain (last year in previous school) and Soccer team member for a few years, despite having arthritis.
•Head of both school’s Film Society and Writing Club
•Did a Stanford University-run summer program for two years (on Screenwriting and Creative Writing)
•Went to Interlochen Arts Camp for two summers
•Participated in a summer philosophy program at Yale (not run by them)

Awards:
•School Highest Achieving in English award (this year)
•School Highest Achiever Award (ninth grade)
•Finalist for and published in Hong Kong Young Writers’ Award 2017
•MUN Best delegate x5
•Sunday class in religious studies for 7 hours. With that on top of Saturday religious obligations, I basically don’t have a weekend.

I really appreciate this help! I’ve been very stressed about college and grades. Don’t have a college counselor so don’t know how I stand and I hope this will help. Something to note may be that I’ve had a very untraditional high school career: I’m a third culture kid who currently live internationally away from my family so I can go to a more rigorous school. All my life I’ve been in very small schools with little resources and few opportunities.

2

Are you a US citizen? Looking for financial aid?

3

Not a US citizen. May be looking for minimal aid.

4

Nobody can “chance” you for such competetive schools, which seem to be randomly selected from the top 20.

5

@Muad_dib That isn’t always true - there are many other threads on here where multiple people have responded to the OP and given them chances for top 20s. In the case of this OP, I think the ECs are above average and the academic profile is good, if the SAT gets raised to 1500+. If they can do that, they would have a slim shot at a Stanford, Harvard or Yale, even if they’ll probably get rejected.

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@DJCURRYBEATS19 said:

That may be true, but are such responses accurate? The only truthful thing you can say is that they have as good a chance as anyone with perfect stats, which is about 1 in 10.

Also, how can anyone “chance” the OP when they are “planning on” increasing their SAT score to 1500+ (hardly a given).

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Unless you won big awards, “chance me” on those schools will be meaningless - it’s crap shot. Try to find match and safety schools.

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@Muad_dib If you look at the actual acceptance rates, then yes, there would be only a 1 out of 10 shot of perfect scoring students getting into those top level universities. However, I highly doubt that every applicant, or even a majority of applicants, to these universities are actually qualified, in which case the qualified students would have a higher chance of acceptance. Since CC has an anti-debate policy in the ToS, I’d recommend we just agree to disagree on this particular issue.

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@DJCURRYBEATS19 : You’re not going to quiet me that easily. Schools like Pomona are self-selecting. With few exceptions, everyone applying has perfect grades and test scores. If you are one of those students, Pomona is one of the schools you apply to. Absent letters of recommendation and essays, it makes it impossible to “chance”someone for a school like Pomona. Admissions is somewhat of a crap shoot.

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@Muad_dib While I agree you cannot guarantee someone acceptance, you can atleast tell them whether they would be a competitive candidate or not. Some colleges do separate students into a consideration pile if they catch their eyes and then dive deeper after they finish separating, so while we could not say “you’ll get in” or “you’ll be rejected”, we can atleast say “you’d be a competitive applicant”. I’m not familiar with LACs, so I’m not sure how competitive the applicant pool to Pomona is, but I’d take your word for it that they have a very strong group of applicants.