Here is my breakdown:
Sat: 1580, 780 EBRW, 800 Math Act: 36 overall 36 36 36 36
SAT II: 800 Math 2, 800 Chemistry, 800 US History
UW GPA: 4.0, W GPA 4.45, final class rank approximately 4/415 at large public school
APs: 5s in Calc BC, Comp Sci, Chemistry, HuGeo, World History,
still waiting on scores for Lang, USH, Stats, both econs
Dual enrollment in Calc 3, DiffEq, Linear Algebra, and one further upper level math by senior year
Extracurriculars and Awards:
Member of 3x state championship Science Bowl team
Captain of 1x State Champion History Bowl team, also 2x State JV individual champion and 1x Varsity runner-up in History Bee
Quarterfinalist at National History Bee and US History Bee
Captain and President of Knowledge and Quiz Bowl team
Captain of 1st-place team at HP Codewars Ft. Collins
USACO Gold Qualifier
Attending PROMYS at BU this summer
2x Aime Qualifier
1x UNC Math Contest Finalist
Member of State Runner-up Mock Trial Team
2nd place at FBLA state in Economics Test
2 Best Delegate Awards from local MUN
I’m looking to study a blend of math and CS at college, and am open to a wide array of options, including public and private, large and small, LACs or tech schools.
What’s first tier in CS and Math? MIT, Stanford, Cal Tech, Harvard and Princeton?
It’s strange to hear NU, UMIch and Cornell be called 2nd tier, but even with your extraordinarily high stats, they’re all still reaches for everyone. All three schools that you’ve mentioned accept and also reject similar applicants.
Please do yourself a favor and recalibrate.
Any university with an acceptance rate of 25% or ess is a reach for everyone, even more so for CS.
Your profile s strong but it’s a dime a dozen for CS at Michigan, Cornell or Northwestern. You have a shot for sure but you need to understand that these are too tier schools with low odds of Admissions for anyone.
Now if you’re willing to consider WPI, UMN Twin Cities (COE or CLA), Penn State (CS or IST), Cal Poly SLO, Santa Clara - those are good matches for CS (safeties for math only). Run the NPC.
My bad, I certainly didn’t mean to imply that the schools I mentioned would be easy to get into. I asked about them primarily because I know that the absolute best schools like MIT, Stanford, etc. are reaches for almost everyone.
for CS it’s pretty much universally known, whether they want to acknowledge or not, for CS the first tier in no particular order is CMU, MIT, Stanford and UC-Berkeley. So although it may sound strange, technically speaking, the OP is accurate.
There are no such things as “absolutely best schools”. It is a myth spread by the companies which created the ranking systems and by the graduates of the colleges which wish to be considered “the absolutely best schools” (who are often the ones who develop the ranking methodology, or run the organizations which publish the rankings).
If a school is an “absolutely best school”, anybody who is accepted should succeed, it should teach every major, and it should have a wide selection of students from all socioeconomic backgrounds.
In fact, it is absolutely impossible for any school to be “the absolutely best school”, since not only do different students thrive in different situations, these situations are incompatible.
MIT cannot be the “the absolute best school” for a kid who wants to study agriculture or animals sciences, and how can Harvard be “the absolutely best school” for a kid who does best in the much smaller and personal atmosphere of a small LAC, or a kid who thrives in the diverse and vibrant atmosphere of a public school?
MIT or Harvard are “the absolutely best schools” for kids who will do best in majors which exist in MIT or Harvard, and who are are the type of kids who thrive best is schools that are like MIT or Harvard.
When is comes to an undergraduate major, there are very few cases in which there are anything at all like “absolute best schools”, and those tend to be for very narrow selection of majors.
So you should choose you program based on whether you personally will thrive in a college. That is something which you will not figure out based on rankings, on what some people here consider to be “the best schools”, or on which names are whispered with reverence in your high school, your home town, or your family.
First of all, just as general college rankings are totally unreliable for a particular applicant, CS rankings are also unreliable. CS covers the broadest spectrum of fields/subfields of all majors, so an applicant needs to take a closer look at the specific areas of CS that s/he is interested in. Some of the top ranked CS programs have the breadth, but not necessarily the depth in each area of CS.
OP clearly needs to do more homework. OP’s stats, while high, are fairly common among top applicants to the top CS programs, and many of them have CS or math related ECs that are more impressive than OP’s. So, acceptances are not assured by any means. Of the three schools OP listed, I think OP has a decent chance at NU and UMich, and a somewhat smaller chance at Cornell.
If OP is interested, check out csrankings.org. This is a metric-based (publications) ranking of US. colleges in computer science. You can turn on specific subfields of CS that you are interested and turn off subfields that you are not interested in. You can also choose a more recent time scale to eliminate “reputation bias” from work that happened long ago.
“OP clearly needs to do more homework.”
The OP has done a decent amount of homework, he/she knows it’s going to be easier to get into the schools mentioned vs MIT, Stanford Harvard, Cal Tech for Math, and MIT, Stanford, CMU for CS and Berkeley for CS or EECS. Those are the most difficult to get into for the top math/cs students.
“Many of them have CS or math related ECs that are more impressive than OP’s.”
They do not, not for the schools the OP mentioned. As an example, the OP has qualified for AIME, twice, which would be impressive for the schools mentioned, however the next level after AIME is the AMO, which I don’t think the OP participated in. The AMO qualifiers are applying MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Cal Tech, without a doubt. OP probably knows this and is posting this question.
“but it’s a dime a dozen for CS at Michigan, Cornell or Northwestern.”
Disagree, they’re not a dime a dozen, the OP is very strong student at these schools
OP, you’re in to these types of schools unless they yield protect. You may get into one of the other reaches, so don’t apply ED anywhere. I’d EA to UM and MIT - you’ll have to tell MIT your AMC/AIME scores for sure, since your 800s, while impressive, are going to be very common there and won’t tell them who the best Math students are. Good luck!
Your stats will guarantee to admission to the best AI program in the country. the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Commonwealth Honors college. Classes at Amherst and Smith if you like.
So maybe you should consider what you would probably call a fourth tier school and get your azz kicked by some of the so called dummies in an elite class there.
My S is at one of the above-mentioned schools and I’ve met some of his friends. Anecdotally, they all seem to have CS/math related ECs with awards that are more impressive than OP’s (USAMO qualifier or better, or USACO Platinum or better, or USAPhO qualifier or better) and most of them aren’t even at the top or near-the-top of their class. OP is certainly a qualified applicant to these schools but they seem to look for something significantly beyond scores and grades, even just from the CS/math perspective.
For the three schools OP mentioned, I agree that OP has a reasonable chance as I’ve said before. But acceptances are far from assured, especially at Cornell. Just this past year, one of the most impressive applicants on CC was rejected by Cornell ED (but accepted almost everywhere else he applied).
@privatebanker The honors program at UMass is a possibility for OP but not a guarantee as it’s not purely stats driven. There’s often not a lot of rhyme or reasons as to who gets in and who doesn’t. Your “story” matters just as much as high stats.
I find myself strongly in agreement with @theloniusmonk - the OP seems qualified to apply to ANY school. Certainly, the entire application (essays included) will come to play, but the ECs listed are by no means chopped liver. The rejection of top applicants by some colleges mentioned by @1NJParent are not uncommon on CC. Schools like Georgia Tech and Cornell routinely reject applicants that are accepted by MIT, Stanford, and CMU.
