For the longest time, I was 100% sure I would be a doctor, most likely a pediatrician. I volunteered 150 hours at my local hospital, went to multiple health related summer programs, founded a science club at my school, etc. However, my top interests have always been in the humanities and social sciences, and my B+/A- honors science and math grades show that in comparison to my straight A+ AP English and History grades.
Because of government and economic class that I started taking this year (senior year), I am now thinking about law as a different career path, maybe public health or family law, and it really interests me, but none of my extracurricular show any indication of my interest in law.
This is seriously stressing me out because I am planning to apply to 3 Ivys (HYP) because of their dedication to minority and low income students, great financial aid, and the events that I’ve been invited to for minoroties (I’m a black/Hispanic Caribbean-American student with a single, immigrant mother - my parents never married and I’be never met my dad).
Would my heavily health related extracurriculars be a turn off to these prestigious colleges? Do they get an excess of students who apply interested in becoming lawyers? Are minority students more attractive as pre med or pre law students?
The main issues you may encounter at super-selective colleges are:
a. These colleges are generally considered reach for everyone. Be sure to have affordable safeties in your application list.
b. If you have more than a few grades lower than A, then you may be at a significant disadvantage in this area compared to numerous other applicants to these colleges.
c. Most of these colleges including HYP require both parents’ financial information for financial aid purposes. So, in addition to being reach for admission, financial aid may be a second reach, in that you need to apply for a waiver for non-custodial parent financial information and hope that it is granted. Your college list may have to be tailored to those where non-custodial parent financial information is not an issue (e.g. colleges with financial aid not based on non-custodial parent financial information, or colleges where you can earn merit scholarships).
I would not let C (some colleges requiring both parents’ financial information) intimidate you. Talk to the financial aid office early and often to get some clarity and support on this process. I mentored a student who had a similar profile - her mother was a low-income Caribbean immigrant and she had no contact with her father - and she successfully completed the financial aid process at several top schools. (I also had a related experience in undergrad myself - my parents refused to provide their financial forms for student verification every year I was in college. I was able to bypass this requirement to keep my aid by talking to the financial aid office. So ask!)
Beyond that, a couple points:
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It is possible to be good at, and very interested in, math and the sciences and the social sciences and humanities at the same time. I think your grades indicate that you are an all around good student with talents in all of those fields.
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It is also possible to be super interested in the humanities and social sciences but also want to be a physician. Many doctors didn’t major in the sciences in undergrad. Some medical schools, like Mount Sinai and Yale, even have special programs for the humanities in medicine (and Mount Sinai has some geared specifically at humanities undergrads). So if you want to major in a social sciences or humanities field, but you still have interest in being a doctor as well…those things are not incongruous or incompatible.
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However, if it’s simply the case that your career interests are evolving - that’s perfectly normal and most colleges understand that most people can’t accurately plot the course of their entire careers out between the ages of 14 and 17. Thinking you’ll do one thing and actually ending up doing another is VERY common for high schoolers (and frankly, at all stages of life!)
If you get rejected from the top schools, it is very unlikely to be because you expressed a variety of different interests in high school.
Minority students are underrepresented in both medicine and law, so either of those is a noble pursuit from that standpoint. But I don’t think the top schools pay a whole lot of attention to the career goals of their students in considering admissions, because for adolescents it’s just going to change so much. It’s changing now but until recently becoming a management consultant usually wasn’t a life dream of high schoolers - it was something they didn’t find out about until college, but large swaths of the Ivy populations end up going into consulting after college.
At most colleges, there is no such thing as “pre law.” You can major in whatever you like, be pre-med if you like, have whatever ECs you like, and then later on - even well after college graduation - decide to apply to law school. You would want a high college GPA.