This worries me everyday

supersizeme
Mon, 18 Jul 2011 02:56:27 +0000

So my Freshman year I did really well in all my classes and ended my first year with a 4.06 unweighted GPA (this is because an A+ = 4.4). Towards the end of my Freshman year I got in over my head and decided to take 3 AP classes, and needless to say, I got owned. This was partly due to poor course scheduling where I had all three of my AP classes and Honors Chinese the same day (90 minute blocks of each class). I know this is not an extraordinary schedule by any means and a lot of CCers have equal (if not more) rigorous schedules, but this was my first year of APs and I was extremely exhausted and tired throughout the entire semester and would get on average 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night. My parents weren’t exactly helpful either and made this whole ordeal much much worse (not something I want to go into detail about, but is it worth noting to someone like a counselor?) and I live very far from school, so I get home late and have to wake up early. Long story short, I finished my Sophomore year sitting at a 3.93 weighted GPA. This has been annoying me because I know that my stupid decision led to an uncountable number of unfortunate events that drove my GPA down into oblivion.

My question is this: if I get my GPA up to about a 3.98 weighted, will that give me a chance at Yale? I have good ECs that are both unique and show my deep understanding and love for politics and debate. I’m also predicting a 2250+ SAT, as I’ve been scoring around there in practice tests.

Couple things to note:


I go to an international school in Asia that sends a sizable amount of students to Ivies/T20 schools. My school also doesn’t rank, but provides the # of students sitting in a certain GPA range. I sit at roughly top 20-15%.
Also, I got 3 Bs and 1 B+ Sophomore year. Two of the the three Bs I got were in the first semester (both classes were APs), but I ended up scoring a 5 on both AP exams. I also showed progression going from 2 Bs and a B+ my first semester to 1 B in an honors class second semester (this was because I was constantly out of school and my teacher basically didn’t let me take half the tests because I was out of school, but such is life)