Reasonable Expectations

Chance Me / Match Me
1

<p>I’m basically just wondering, not if i can get into these schools (we all know that that’s a very tough thing to predict) but instead the schools that i should be planning on deciding between come march.</p>

<p>SAT: 1440 (highest, 2nd time was 1430 :frowning: )
ACT: 32
SAT2s: Math IIC: 800, Physics: 700, Writing: 760
PSAT: 219, Kansas National Merit Finalist (hopefully…)
School Curriculum: IB diploma candidate with, literally, the hardest courses available to me every year/hardest courses in all of Wichita Kansas. Throughout Highschool…
Cum. GPA: 3.59
Extracurriculars: East Conservation Organization Member and President, Interact Executive, NHS executive, Scholar’s Bowl, Science Olympiad, Online Newspaper, Initiated Tutoring program at school for suffering freshman, etc.</p>

<p>“Internship” at local Orthopeadic research Institute (wasn’t for money or anything, pretty much volunteering, about 110 hours in a month, 1 and a half months)</p>

<p>AP: Calc AB: 5, AP US HISTORY: 2 (haha, sophomore year)</p>

<p>Pretty much my list:
KU, Tulsa, Rice, Northwestern, Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan (want to go here), Illinois Urbana Champagne, Minnesota Twin Cities, Rice, Yale, Washington St. Louis, GeorgiaTech, Texas A&M, University of Texas Austin, University of Houston.</p>

<p>Which ones should i not worry too much about and which ones should i just forget i applied to?</p>

2

<p>wow, a big list…btw, you have rice on there twice…but other than that, I think you have a pretty good shot. Maybe the low GPA might hurt you with the colleges like NU and UC-Berkeley. Yale might be the same. I can’t say much abaout the other ones, but they’re pretty much matches from what I can tell.</p>

3

<p>how much do they factor in the IB courses? I’ve taken non-IB courses and AP courses and they are an utter breeze compared to the IB courses that i’ve taken. I’ve also taken the hardest path (Higher Level Math and two sciences). The low GPA is a killer, i know. I always expected that to be the worst of all the other factors, i just sorta want to know how much can it be recitified by the nature of the courses.</p>

4

<p>I think you’ll be accepted into any state school. maybe not UC but who wants to go to UC anyways?</p>

5

<p>Bhishma, the low GPA will be a killer, regardless of your courseload. Tons of people get near 4.0uw GPAs while taking an extremely challenging courseload.</p>

6

<p>Yale is a super reach, but if you write a great essay, you never know. </p>

<p>Northwestern, Cal, Rice, Michigan (if you haven’t yet applied) and Washington U are matches/reaches (less than 50% chance of getting acceptance).</p>

<p>Georgia Tech, Michigan (if you applied early), UT-Austin and Illinois are matches/safeties (better than 50% of getting acceptance). </p>

<p>Minnesota-Twin Cities, KU, Texas A&M, Tulsa, Houston, are safeties. </p>

<p>The reason you have match/reaches and match/safeties rather than just plain matches and reachesis because your GPA is kind of low given your SAT. I realize you took tough classes, and that is always good, but it could hurt you a little.</p>

7

<p>Oh snaps, i forgot about rankings…</p>

<p>In rankings, i am something around 70 out of 400ish. So, really quite dissappointing. The problem is, up until last year, our school did not do rankings because the IB program interfered with the entire system. Unfortunately, colleges just did not take that as an excuse so they started doing a ranking system with UNWEIGHTED GPAs. Meaning, those that are in an IB program are screwed because they are placed behind the 4.0 IB AND 4.0 regular ed students. And so on and so on. Is the ranking going to be a really bad part of it too? I’m hoping that there’s something that describes our school’s system in the University’s files, but in the end i’m quite worried about that.</p>

8

<p>Might want to add some eastern liberal arts schools like Colgate, Holy Cross or Bowdoin. Holy Cross offers good financial aid and its location is only 1 hour from Boston.</p>