Type of high school (or current college for transfers): Competitive public high school
Cost Constraints / Budget No constraints
Intended Major(s)
Computer Science/Data Science
GPA, Rank, and Test Scores
Unweighted HS GPA: 3.65
Weighted HS GPA: 4.28
Class Rank: top 19% out of around 800
SAT Score: 1560 (1590 superscore)
List your HS coursework
Virtually all advanced courses including AP Physics 1, AP Lang, APUSH, AP Physics 2, CSA, AP Chem, Calc BC, AP Macro, AP Micro, AP World History
5s on 17 AP Exams, 4s on 2 exams
Awards
National Merit Scholarship Semifinalist
USACO Gold
Math contest placement
Professional technology certifications in Java, Python, and Azure
Extracurriculars
AWS internship - worked with AWS professionals designing serverless applications, built machine learning models
Data science company internship - built AI models for company use
UI/UX & full-stack development internship at cosmetics company
Built and deployed financial web application that teaches financial literacy and allows portfolio management
Built and deployed disaster relief iOS app
published research on tariffs and blockchains in JSR
president of 2 STEM related clubs
Tang Soo Do Black Belt
Kumon Lead Instructor
~100 hours volunteering at organizations
Essays/LORs/Other
Essays 7-8/10
LOR
STEM teacher: 7/10
CTO at data science company I interned at: 8/10
Owner of the cosmetics company I interned at: 7/10
Schools
If a scholarship is necessary for affordability, indicate that you are aiming for a scholarship and use the scholarship chance to estimate it into the appropriate group below; also, for colleges that admit by major or division, consider that in chance estimate.
Safety:
A&M
Target:
UT Austin
University of Washington
Purdue
UC San Diego
Reach
Georgia Tech
UNC
Rice
UC Berkeley
UIUC
Columbia
Applying early action to virtually all schools. I want to inquire specifically abt my chances for UT Austin being outside top 5%.
You have a shot. Your scores are on point and, most importantly, you have solid EC for fit to major. At many competitive high schools people outside of auto admit get in to competitive majors. Data science is considered a “moderately competitive” major according to a major UT consultant who publishes his opinions on these kinds of things. Not a guarantee but since your rank is from a competitive in state school I’d say you are in the mix. Good luck.
ETA I just noticed 3.65 GPA. Not sure how I missed that when I first wrote this but your grades are low for this. Still, top 19% from a competitive in state school (that part is key) with top test scores and solid ECs would potentially keep you in the mix for Data Science. Give it a shot.
All of your targets are reaches for CS (and at least some may still be reaches generally with a top 19% rank and 3.65 GPA).
Texas A&M College Station has secondary admission to CS (process called ETAM). 3.75 college GPA in first year engineering courses means automatic admission, but CS has very few spaces available for those not getting a 3.75 college GPA.
Of course, if you mean some other A&M (i.e. not the one in College Station, or one in another state like Alabama or Florida), then admission may be much less difficult.
Since Purdue is on your list, you might look at the Purdue Data Digest, here: https://www.purdue.edu/datadigest/; and especially the links to “Applications, Admits, and Matriculations” and “New First-Time Beginner Profile”. You can plug in your stats to some of the interactive links on these sites, and perhaps get an idea where you might fall relative to recently admitted OOS applicants to Purdue.
Computer science may be a hard row to hoe for admission at Purdue.
I think the entire list provided will be hard, including A&M, not to mention secondary admissions if you get in, which I’m not convinced is assured. Possible yes but safety no.
What about my second question? If the answer to it is “yes”, then I can’t see any downside to listing CS as your first choice and DS as your second choice over listing DS as your first choice.
I know you are asking this directly to OP but I’ll chime in here generally…UT generally does not consider second major choice at all except for auto admits. They put that right on the common app. So if someone who is not auto admit applies for CS first and DS second, DS would never even be considered.