Transfer to Ivy

Since I had no idea what ACM was, I looked it up, and it seems that (re)establishing a chapter is largely a matter of some quick paperwork and finding a faculty advisor and a few folks to sign up to be officers/members. My high school student did something similar last year with a national chapter of an organization he was interested in bringing to campus, and I’m not sure it will even end up on his college application as it wasn’t really hard to do. My guess is that AO’s are well aware of this.

As for the IEEEXtreme Competition, and again, I had to look this up - your team was ranked 1,363 out of over 6,000 teams in the world (congratulations!), but many university teams whose CS departments don’t even rank in the top 200 did better, so, probably not super impressive to an AO (though VERY impressive to me!).

No question your GPA is quite strong, and I do agree you should always try if that is what you really want to do, but given the tough financial situation you are in, and the fact that your current co-curricular achievements are not as stellar as the competition you are up against at the top school/s in the country, is it enough to trigger an acceptance? My guess is, respectfully, no.

But then again, we could all be wrong.