<p>ECs listed on app: football, track, was in 2 clubs, and work</p>
<p>Job/Work Experience: did finances that were really receipts at a family friend’s company and also had a job there too</p>
<p>Essays (subject and responses): already started so they should be very good- on two hardships that have come down on me the last 2 years, and my dealing w/ them. </p>
<p>Teacher Recs: better than great</p>
<p>Counselor Rec: great</p>
<p>School Type: Private, does not rank </p>
<p>Ethnicity: Hispanic</p>
<p>Gender:M</p>
<p>Also: Took 3 summer courses at a local comm. college; got A’s</p>
<p>As an out of stater who was rejected, let me tell you my experience. When I went on a tour and spoke with the Admissions office, they were gong-ho on using a holistic approach to freshmen applicants - HOG WASH! All they look at and care about are: (1) GPA and (2) SAT/ACT. Your GPA (for an out of state student) is low, but you have a fighting chance with your SAT/ACT scores.</p>
<p>I’m an in state student and I have a PSAT score that’s enough for National Merit. My SATs and GPA are almost the same, does National Merit improve my chances or do they not care about that either?</p>
<p>IMO SAT plays the biggest role if your gpa is in their ballpark. If you’re OOS it’s a different story because they have such higher standards for them…IMO</p>
Up until like this year being a national merit finalist got you a huge scholarship. I got something like 24k over 4 years on top of bright futures, but I think at some point they eliminated the scholarship. Maybe you can list it under accolades, but other than that it’s pretty useless. I will say this though that in the past UF has been pretty big on mentioning their number of National Merit finalists.</p>
<p>I still think essay does play a large part in admissions. One of my friends has a strong moving hardship essay and she was accepted despite low SAT. It helps that you’re Hispanic.</p>
<p>UE, I don’t think strong essays matter that much… I wrote my essay one hour before the application deadline on Nov. 1 (which probably ended up being crappier than thousands of essays from excellent writers) and I still was accepted to the fall term. GPA, SATs, and ECs play a much bigger role</p>
<p>Haha, so true! Granted I was a NMF, there was an essay topic like “how can you contribute to the diversity of UF” and I wrote essentially “there’s no way to be unique when a campus has 45000 students”.</p>