What schools should I be looking at??? (Rising Senior)

College Search & Lists
1

Stats:
ACT/SAT/SAT II:
Sat: 1550 (780 ERW, 770 Math)
Sat mathII: 800
Sat ush: 770
UW/W GPA and Rank: UW: 4.0 W: 4.5 School doesnt rank

Freshman: Can’t take APs, took 2 honors classes
Sophomore: Apwh (4) Only AP available + 2 honors classes
Junior: USH (5), lang (5), Calc AB (5) + 2 honors classes
Senior: Calc BC, Literature, Gov, Econ, Stat, APES

Awards:
-A few speech and debate awards from districts and for breaking to outrounds at invitationals
-AP Scholar with Honor
-Virtual Enterprise Microcapital Challenge Gold Award (state competition)

Extracurriculars:
Forensics Speech and Debate (11, 12) - State Qualifier (CA), and made outrounds to many invitationals in public forum, also did speech in a couple events and broke to outrounds same thing as debate

Marketing & Management - Virtual Enterprise (11, 12) - COO of school’s company (leadership position i guess), fared decent in competitions. This is a program where we build a company and compete in trade shows in different events like HR, Finance, Business Plan, Marketing, etc. It’s like the DECA of our school

Business Club Vice President (11, 12) - planned and facilitated entrepreneurship-related activities for ~15 students, year-round

Business Podcast (11, 12) - created a podcast took a few months, did an episode on every business venture i had its about helping teens build wealth and earn money its kinda cool

Cepheus Co. (9, 10) - Gaming “startup”, founded a game server by hiring web and java devs, graphic designers, ingame builders, etc had 2000+ unique joins. Took a year to make, ran for a few months, and shut it down

Reselling (9, 10, 11, 12) - Game accounts, Social media accounts, shoes, hype clothing and items. Have made thousands in profit, just a hobby ive carried throughout high school

Cross Country; Track & Field Member (9, 10) - got 2 var letters, 1 in each sport

Essays/LORs/Other: Haven’t written essays, have two LORs from APlang and APUSH im not gonna put numbers on them but theyre decent

200~ volunteering hours, half from coaching a special ed track team

Demographics:
Male, Indian, California, Semicompetitive Bay Area Public High School
Class size: 950
Intended Major(s): Econ or Finance

Personal note: Course load was just as rigorous as other competitive students but the number of APs was weak. Don’t know if this matters. Also ECs are kinda weak. I have no research or internships. Therefore, I may or may not do an internship at a nonprofit and take on a marketing position for a restaurant before i send in my app! I’m trying to do these if I have the time

Please let me know which schools I should be looking at. I didn’t pad my resume with awards and ECs I’ve never done before so this is truthfully me.

2

what size of school? what environment/weather do you like? what can you afford to pay?

3

Is Berkeley not good enough?

4

If you decide on economics, you could find some great choices through these analyses:

https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.uslacecon.html

https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.usecondept.html

If you prefer finance, you can concentrate on schools with undergraduate business programs, or you could pair your economics studies with advanced courses in mathematics.

5

Not a complete liberal arts school, but I prefer smaller sized. Don’t care about weather, and I don’t need financial aid.

I really don’t appreciate the learning environment there from what I’ve heard but I do understand that it’s top tier for my major. I’ll definitely apply!

I never thought about pairing econ with advanced math, I just don’t know if I’m passionate about math enough to do that. I’m going to try to major in finance but I’ll do the econ/math thing if it isn’t available. Thanks for the links. Is that a rating of how good l the undergrad econ programs are or how good the whole research and grad econ departments are? I can’t tell sorry

6

As my best attempt to answer your questions regarding the relevance of the department rankings, I’ll quote an earlier study on the topic of faculty research in economics, in which Hartley and Robinson wrote,

On the undergraduate level, these benefits would be most pronounced, of course, at colleges at which the most accomplished faculty teach a range of undergraduate courses and actively mentor undergraduate research. As you peruse the rankings, you will note helpful distinctions, such as between Columbia’s undergraduate economics department (#7) and its graduate school of business department (#19).

7

As an adjustment to the above, it appears that Columbia’s Arts and Sciences economics department (#7) includes faculty that teach courses across its undergraduate and graduate programs (as would also be the case for other departments with similar designations).