I’m a rising junior.
-UW GPA – 3.4 (out of 4), But, I want to bring it up to a 3.6 or 3.7 by the end of Junior year.
-W GPA – 3.7 (out of 4)
-PSAT I – 1370 (out of 2400), I will be taking it in Spring and my goal is 2000, 2100- 2200 would be an ideal miracle.
-AP courses – I’ll be taking AP US History, AP Spanish 5, and AP English 11. I plan on taking four or five more during my senior year.
EC’s:
-75+ volunteer hours due to school related activities. But, I plan on accumulating up to 1200 over time between September 2015 and November 2016 from Homeless Shelter, Elderly homes, Animal Shelter or veterinary office, and Internship at a Hospital during the summer of 2016.
Will be a member of Key Club this year.
Plan on starting the Red Cross chapter at my school this year.
-Horseback riding for three hours a week
I have done peer tutoring privately in the past, but will be joining tutoring club in school this year.
I also plan on being a peer mentor during my senior year for Freshman.
I plan on starting a part time job in March 2016 as a waitress.
I taught myself to play piano when I was eleven and have been taking lessons for the past for years. I also will be taking lessons once a week this school year.
I spent my free time during my freshman, and sophomore year writing poetry and short stories.
-I worked as a babysitter for five hours a week during my sophomore year.
Honors/Awards:
-Made honor roll every year (Mostly A’s and B’s, some C’s )
-I go to a public school.
-I am an African American female
-I want to go to college for nursing, business/ finance, or pre-med.
If I achieve my goals, my reaches will be places like NYU, Wake Forest, and Boston University.
IMHO: the biggest deficiency in your profile is your SAT. I would advise you to focus on test prep for the SAT and also the ACT (often, people who do poorly on one, do surprisingly well on the other) as well as getting that 3.7 GPA – these two data points will be the MOST important things for college admissions and scholarships. You should even cease other ECs for this – not kidding.
Without a real SAT or ACT score, it’s pointless to guess at what is a good suite of match schools for you. Nudge your parents on the “money talk” too — you don’t want to be aiming for things your family simply can’t afford.
What’s your home state? Also you spend a lot of time planning, but you do realize you need to execute this stuff right? Study for the SAT by taking practice tests. Don’t fret so much about the amount of volunteer hours you have. Colleges want quality over quantity. Don’t do that many volunteer hours unless you truly want to and not just for the college admissions. You should look at University of Alabama, try some HBCU’s(they offer a lot of financial aid opportunities even for the ones that have a higher white percentage) , West Virginia University, University of Pittsburgh are some I can think of at the top of my head. Find some safeties. You’re a great candidate for a lot of schools, but you honestly have to decide that for yourself, since you know you better than we do. You’re doing so much planning, but what are you doing right now during the summer? You can start looking for jobs now instead of waiting since you can’t plan for jobs to hire you. My biggest advice again, is to stop planning so much. You have to put in work for all of this stuff. Have you talked to a teacher and the principal about starting a new club?
You can do quite well in “nursing, business/ finance, or pre-med” at many schools other than NYU, Wake Forest or Boston University, and save money on tuition and fees as well. Look into Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois; University of South Alabama in Mobile, Alabama; and, if you can get your SAT scores up a bit, Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas; all have good programs in what you seek to study.
I second the suggestion above about taking the ACT as well as re-taking the SAT; most students do better on one test or the other, and perhaps you can get a higher score on the ACT.
Algebra: Assuming each of your three years has about the same number of credits means the HIGHEST your GPA can go by end of Junior year is a 3.6 (3.4 x 2 + 4.0). You need to focus less on your ECs and more on your grades.
That’s good. I know pre-med is one of the majors with the highest SATs.
Boston & Wake Forest could be matches with those scores.
What states would you prefer to be in? Do you know what price range you’d need? (There’s tons of schools with pre-med).
@ErinsDad I’m not technically involving myself in another club. I canceled out a lot of the stuff on that list and only came down to four clubs and one extra because it only meets monthly.
Adding 1200 volunteer hours in 14 months is almost impossible and frankly not worth the effort. As others have stated, you need to work hard in school and try and get your grades up as much as possible and do as much test prep as you can manage without sacrificing grades. As for ECs, try and focus on one or two areas in depth if possible. Don’t worry about the sheer number of hours - think more about what you’re interested in. For example, if you like horseback riding, maybe you can volunteer at a therapeutic riding program. If you enjoy music and piano, maybe you can play piano at a nursing home or work with an after-school music program.