Thank you @legacymom1 and @browniebutton50 for the encouragement, and congrats on your kids’ amazing outcome!
This is my first, and maybe last, long post on CC. I just want to share our data points to give back to this amazing community. All kids are different and they all have their unique paths and their own ways to thrive in colleges, and life in general. I am sharing mine, to maybe help a few kids that share similar interests and stats as mine.
Twins, both NMS (both 1520/1520), both top 1% or 2% at my local, highly ranked public high school in CT. They didn’t fill nor submit any financial aid request.
Tests include: 10 and 11 APs taken, all in 10 & 11 grades as our school doesn’t allow AP during 9th grade (Lang, Calc BC, Physics C E&M, C Mech, Statistics, CS A, CS P, Macro, Micro, Chem, APUSH) , SAT 1580 & 1600, ACT 36 (all 1 sitting no super-score) DEs include JHU and local community college courses.
Awards include: 5 national hackathon wins at MLH, Modeling the future, ranked #1 a CT/NY regional Lockheed Martin code quest advanced division, NIH Brain Challenge, Fed Challenge.
Leaderships: debate club, coding club, open source non-profit.
Goals: One is interested in Ed Tech and the other is healthcare tech. They either applied to CS+Business (if school offers this combined degree), CS (if transfer in is limited) or business (with the intention to double major in CS, if there is a good undergraduate business school)
Results:
The twin had the same results except 3 schools (listed under Mixed)
Accepted:
- UPenn (ED deferred, RD accepted) Their older brother is currently a sophomore at Penn.
- CMU (admit tour next week, concern is the stress, especially for CS major)
- WashU. Langsdorf scholars full merit scholarship. (Kids just did their all-paid-for 3-day scholar tour, kids fell in love w/ the people and campus. 2 minor issues: not a strong CS program although the career outcome is good, and bit far from home)
- UMich. CS admit. (love everything! minor concern: north & central campus distance makes CS+business harder to dm)
- Georgia Tech. ECE. (admit tour, kids love the vibe and geeky but cheerful peers)
- Northeastern. EA admit. Honors Program $27,000/year (prospective tour, love the location, honor dorm & coop!)
- UMD. CS admit. President’s Award $12,500/year (prospective tour, kids loved like the campus, their crazily good CS program, being able to take Amtrak home is a plus)
- UMass Amherst. CS admit, Honors College, Chancellor’s Award $16,000/year (love their CS program and #1 food!)
- Penn State. CS admit. Applied rolling, got in 1st wave in mid-Nov. (love their CS building, engineering program, campus and town)
Wait-listed:
- Cornell Dyson (official campus visit)
- Columbia Engineering (mom legacy)
- JHU (official campus visit, summer courses)
- UChicago
- Vanderbilt (official campus visit + regional AO visit)
Rejects:
- USC (EA deferred then reject)
Mixed:
- NYU Stern (twin 1 wait-listed, twin 2 accepted, double legacy)
- Yale (twin 1 wait-listed, twin 2 rejected, summer YYGS)
- Duke (twin 1 rejected, twin 2 wait-listed)
Takeaways:
- Do a rolling admit at a school you like, for us it’s Penn State. The wait would have been much more painful for us without knowing you can attend a school you like
- They absolutely would love to go to any school they applied to, each of them have the pros and cons. Public schools is more restrict in changing majors, but generous AP policies means they can graduate in 2-3 years. Some schools have good food, good vibe, good people, and some are close to home or job markets.
- Wait-list and rejection, while making perfect business sense for schools, do not reflect, in any ways, your characters and strength. Twins each got 2 rejections, and the common one is USC. USC is an amazing school but probably not the lowest admit rate one, so you can see how random this process is.
- Their demographics and academic interests (Asian, male, affluent zip code, upper middle class, CS/business major) are the most highly impacted, so we applied to 18 schools (not a fan of applying to many schools but I felt we had no choice.) In hindsight, we could have reduced a few, but the truth is, they got waitlisted by almost all their reach schools, so to get into a “reach” school, you might have to apply to the same amount of schools. Not suer there is a solution for this craziness.
Best of luck to you all and God bless! DM me if you have questions, I am happy to answer!