What are my chances if I go test optional? [Grade 12, Biochemistry major; 3.85 UW, 4.32 W GPA, VA resident]

Chance Me / Match Me
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Demographics

  • US Citizen
  • State/Location of residency: Virginia
  • Type of high school: Public school somewhat academic?
  • Other special factors: 3 siblings with 2 in college and both my parents are immigrants for Vietnam

Cost Constraints / Budget
I don’t get any grants from FAFSA because my family got lucky and made ~140k in stocks in 2024. I really want to go OOS but the problem is definitely cost because both my siblings tuition is ~100k. I am trying for as many scholarships as I can and I have some money saved, I will also be working through college. I am currently a Semi-finalist for POSSE which is full tuition and DAP2 results should be coming out soon so I would need to ED to UVA if I match. I also got nominated for the Milken scholarship.

Intended Major(s)

Biochemistry on a Premed track

GPA, Rank, and Test Scores

  • Unweighted HS GPA: 3.85/4.00
  • Weighted HS GPA: 4.32 (my junior year gpa was 4.73)
  • Class Rank: N/A
  • ACT/SAT Scores: Took October ACT and think I did good? If not I’d go optional

List your HS coursework

  • English: English 9 & 10 Honors, AP Lang

  • Math: Algebra 1 & 2 honors, Geometry Honors, AP Precalc BC, AP Calc AB (supposed to take BC but schedule conflict that my counselor will include in my LOR)

  • Science: Honors and AP Chem, Honors and AP Bio, AP Physics C: Mech, Anatomy & Physiology, AP Psychology

  • History and social studies: AP World

  • Language other than English: ASL 1, 2, & 3

  • Visual or performing arts: Orchestra

  • Other academic courses: Child Development, Nutrition & Wellness

College Coursework (Transfer Applicants)

  • General education course work: DE US Government, DE US History, DE English 12

Awards

Extracurriculars
Chapter President of Family, Career and Community Leaders of America (11,12)

  • Placed 1st in State Leadership Conference in level 3 for STAR Event Foods Innovations 2026 (Nationally Qualifying)
  • Recruited 90+ students; directed bimonthly meetings; raised $3K+, coordinated service donations to local shelters (~120 homemade muffins annually).

NYU Simons Science Exploration:

  • Fully funded (received ~$1500 stipend) Collaborated w/ NYU professors in labs & research across orgo/gen chem, bio, physics, psych & neuroscience as 1 of <80 attendees.

National Club Volleyball (9,10,11) Libero/DS

  • Irish Rumble — Second Place, Gold Bracket

    National Harbor Showdown — First Place, Bronze Bracket

    SOMDVBC Invitational — Second Place

    Spring Fling — First Place, Bronze Bracket

    Lucky Charm Classic — Second Place

  • Played up an age group and got scholarships to play for 2 different club

  • Played ~8 nat’l qualifiers/invitationals yearly

Independent Women’s Health Platform

  • Founded platform; researched & created 24+ endometriosis education, symptom-awareness & advocacy posts; generated 140K+ views, 20K+ interactions(mentioned in my essay)

Work Experience (part-times since 13): I would work 36-43 hours in the summer and 20-30 during school

  • Soccer Ref 2023-2026
  • Niche Asian Grill 2025
  • Pei Wei 2025-2026
  • KBBQ Server 2026 (current)
  • CVS Pharm Tech 2026 (current)- Process ~160 prescriptions/day; manage inventory of 800+ medications; assist 200+ customers daily with prescriptions, insurance, questions & payment

Science Olympiad

  • Competing in Chem Lab, Water Quality, Forensics across 5–7 highly competitive invitationals, including MIT, Cornell, & UPenn.

Assistant Youth Soccer Coach Volleyball Summer Camp Counselor (2025)

  • Completed 40 hours supervising and mentoring campers while creating a positive, supportive, and inclusive environment for girls of varying skill levels (~200 participants)

  • Coached U8–U11 soccer 3 yrs; led practices, games & goalie drills

Other random fillers

Essays/LORs/Other
For LOR I have my AP Chem and my honors Chem teacher, they both know me extremely well. I have my FCCLA sponsor doing my optional letter and she LOVES me, all the officers quit at some point and I ran the club alone for months.

My personal statement is for the prompt where you challenge a belief or idea. I use an extended metaphor of how I believed life was like a GPS and there was always another route and path forward. I then challenged it by introducing my incurable disease and talked about how I took initiative and made my platform where I was able to help others and draw my own blue line for myself. (If you would like to read plz give me feedback)

  • Assured (100% chance of admission and affordability): GMU, NOVA
  • Extremely Likely: VCU
  • Likely: Pitt, UMD, Rochester
  • Toss-up: Case Western, UVA
  • Lower Probability: Tulane, Emory, Wake Forest
  • Low Probability: Rice, Tufts
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Great record. You just need one and you have VCU.

UMD and Rochester are likely low reach, not likely. But per my first note it doesn’t matter. UMD is $60kish. Can you afford that ?

I agree with the rest.

What if you don’t get Posse? It’s not easy to work in college, especially STEM, and this isn’t a list built on affordability unless you qualify for big need aid which you make it sound like you don’t.

So if you don’t qualify for need aid, I’d completely redo the list.

Btw FAFSA doesn’t give you loans/grants per se although you could qualify. Schools do and these use CSS.

You can be pre med anywhere and med schools don’t seem to care where you go to college - so what is your budget - what can they afford to pay ? You have many options in VA like UMW, CNU…others in MD like Salisbury, which will cost half of UMD. And depending on your ACT there could be others.

But I think your overall expectations are a bit ‘liberal’ but if you’re good with VCU, then it’s fine.

Good luck.

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Congratulations on your achievements. Let’s wait for your ACT scores before talking test optional or not.

FAFSA for 2027-28 is based on 2025 income. Have you filed FAFSA? If so, what is your SAI? FAFSA won’t take your college going siblings into account when calculating what you can afford, but some CSS Profile colleges will.

Is UVA affordable if you get Posse? If you don’t qualify for need based aid, you would still have to pay room, board, books, incidentals. Run the UVA NPC here: Net Price Calculator

Are VCU and GMU affordable? You should run the NPC on all the schools on your list.

Everyone who files FAFSA qualifies for the federal direct student loan…it’s not tied to income. Federal loans are $5.5K max the first year, $27K undergrad limit for most students.

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I could do around $60k for tuition, I think its more of around $90k I cant do but I do make well under $200K and I know some private schools like Emory offer full tuition for families under $200K.

For work I already know I would need to volunteer or work for my clinical hours in college and over the summer I am definitely going to rack up non-clinical hours at my pharmacy job. I was also going to go back to my old job where I made ~$300 per shift and I do have some money saved up. I really want my school to have some sort of hospital close by and a medical school because the opportunities would also be better for me.

I am trying for a lot more scholarships too so I am going to cross my fingers I just don’t want my hard work in high school to go to waste.

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Q: Did you take the PSAT/NMSQT junior year? If so, how did you do? Also, what about any AP scores you’d like to share?

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Not necessarily. Those tables have a disclaimer - they look at your families assets. They have fine print. So if they own a home or have stocks and bonds, other property, etc they may not. They are also need aware (some schools), so if they determine you need too much they can turn you down.

You also need $400k or more to pay for med school.

Here are the colleges people at UTK and UK med school attended. I list because they show. I am also putting top school Vanderbilt’s app success to med school - not very in most cases. But it’s very clear than many kids that go to lesser known names attend med school. Budget is paramount.

If you are serious about med school, save money now. And have your family run the net price calculators for your schools. There are many lower cost options out there, even out of state. You need an assured one.

Look at Wofford, which has merit and places you for shadowing in their J Term. It’s competitive but Va Tech has shadowing on campus. If your SAT score is good, look at College of Charleston and apply to Honors. If you get invited to interview for the Fellows program, it will come with $$. MUSC is a few blocks away - Med U of SC - so there’s potential opportunities there.

I wouldn’t worry about being close to a hospital though. You will do activities while not in school.

But your college isn’t four years and the next four will be much pricier. So save up front.

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I didn’t know I had it until the day of so I did pretty bad and I never really focused on testing like the SAT or ACT because I had been so busy with all my ecs and classes. For AP scores I got a 4 on Chem, 5 on Psych, and 3 on Lang

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The PSAT is now history & the scores you received likely aren’t accurate.

This is a good mix of good, very good, & excellent scores. Definitely prepare for all AP exams you are scheduled to take next May.

You really want to go OOS but then you need to match with UVA is you win the Posse Scholarship. This is contradictory. Are your top choices Rice & Tufts? Can you apply this scholarship to match with one of those schools, pending ACT results?

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I took the paper ACT so I don’t know if it will come in time for my EA. My SAI is 71464 but the thing is my asset were really high in 2025 then we lost it all. UVA would be really affordable if I were to win Posse . VCU and GMU also would be affordable and I already got into GMU through direct admission.

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If you get a good ACT, you go go cheaper OOS than UVA. Even without, you can but the name won’t have the heft you want. UVA is not cheap.

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If I were to match with UVA I would still need to go through round 3 but I would most likely do UVA because of the scholarship. My top choices are Emory and Case Western and Posse is a state thing so it was Virginia schools.

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But what if CWRU and Emory come over $60k?

How will you pay for med school ?

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Do you mean your income was high in 2025? In your OP, you said income was high in 2024. Regardless, when you did this year’s FAFSA, you should have used assets as the day you filed. Is that what you/your parents entered?

If what you are saying is that your family’s 2026 income is going to be significantly lower than in 2025, you can speak with financial aid officers once you receive your awards, and ask for professional judgment. Some schools will take the change in income into account and offer you more aid. It will just be a case by case basis.

Great that VCU and GMU are affordable, and congrats on the GMU acceptance :tada:

Good luck with Posse and UVA!

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Yes sorry that was a typo I will fix it, I will also ask my parents because they were telling me that the income was higher in 2025 because of our increase in stocks but I will confirm.

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They need to fill in NPCs but you also can’t assume flat costs for future years. Some will increase aid if they feel it’s warranted. Others won’t.

You should find a school that will assuredly hit your budget all four years - ie one that hits full pay or with auto merit.

If you won’t be happy at GMU or VCU, you should expand your list IMHO.

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Budget for 8 years of university. The last 4 will be expensive. It is likely to be way easier to save money on the first 4 years (undergraduate). When you are looking at your list of acceptances this coming April, definitely take the cost of attendance into consideration when deciding where to go to university.

The large majority of students who start university thinking “premed” end up doing something else. There are lots and lots of forms of something else that are possible. Some are biomedical-related, some are not. However, you do not want your budget to preclude you going to medical school. Also, quite a few of the forms of “something else” that are possible will also involve some form of graduate school.

At least our experience is that there are lots of very small scholarships, that really do not matter much. The scholarships that matter, at least in our experience, are the ones that you get from the university that you are attending.

As such your choice of which university to attend is likely to have a very large impact on the cost of attendance.

This is a very good idea and will make it easier to get medical shadowing experience.

There is a very important point here that you definitely will want to keep in mind.

First of all, students in very good MD programs (and very good DO programs) come from a very wide range of undergraduate universities. You can attend any one of at least 200 and probably more like 300 or even 500 or more different universities and colleges and still go on to attend a very good MD program.

However, premed classes in university are going to be very challenging at any of these universities. As an example, if you attend VCU, your hard work in high school will not be wasted at all. Instead, your hard work in high school will help you a lot in terms of making you better prepared to do well in these tough premed classes. Part of this is that you already know something related to chemistry and biology and physics and math. A bigger part of this is that you most likely at least know something about how to organize your hard work and keep ahead in your work and put in the studying time (and of course always pay attention in every class). Study skills take some effort, and your very good results in high school suggest that you are ready to take on these tough premed classes. Of course if all of this hard work in high school brings in merit aid that is even better.

One daughter had high school stats that were very similar to yours. She attended a university that is really not ranked all that far off from VCU, but was way up in the northeast of the US closer to where we live. Merit aid helped a lot to make all of this affordable (and my understanding is that VCU has some merit aid for in-state students). She was pre-vet, so the required undergraduate classes were the exact same classes as the premed classes and many of her friend were premed students. She found, I think exactly as you will find, that the premed classes were tough, but that her hard work in high school helped her quite a bit to be ready for the tough premed classes. She did well in applications to DVM programs, and is at work right now and is a (veterinary) doctor.

So I think that there might be three big points here. One is that your hard work in high school is not wasted regardless of where you attend university. Another is that budget matters. The third point is that this is a long and difficult path, you might decide to choose a different path at some point, but if you stick with it then I think that you can do it.

I think that you have a good list of schools. I do not know whether you will get into UVA and I think that Rice and Tufts are unlikely (but possible). However, I think that any school on your list can help you to put in the effort to get yourself to medical school, or wherever else you end up wanting to be.

Best wishes.

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When you say your SAI is $74K is that from FAFSA? I believe FAFSA doesn’t account for multiple siblings in college but many selective colleges use CSS and do account for this, so it’s worth running the NPC at schools you are interested in to see if it gets you to what you need.

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Yes it is from FAFSA, I will do that thank you!

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With two siblings in college, you could still be eligible for financial aid at some schools. Try doing the NPCs for schools like Rochester and CWRU (both good for premed).

Keep in mind that a very difficult English reading comprehension exam makes up 1 of the four sections of the MCAT, so you can either develop a habit of reading and practicing reading comprehension from now, or put in the effort for top scores in the other three sections like this person did: Reddit

Please keep us updated as your results come in

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Is this the first time you have taken the ACT or SAT? If not, what were your scores?

Did you only take one year of social studies?

Some schools want one letter from a humanities teacher and one from a stem teacher. So check

If you plan to apply to UMD, make sure it’s in the early round.