Ukraine has long been known as the Breadbasket of Europe, so your interest in making bread is appropriate as a way to be connected to your culture.
Since you asked for suggestions to help improve your chances of admission to elite universities in the USA, I encourage you to enroll in courses which require intensive writing.
@SJ2727 and @DadOfJerseyGirl I have always listed the first (8) need blind colleges (Brown is recent). I meant to add that those last 3 need to be looked into in detail so thanks for doing that! I have not seen them in previous searches.
I do think it’s important to draw a distinction between need-blind /meet need (like most ivies, I believe) and need-blind but don’t (like Georgetown, who is explicit that there is hardly any funding for international students). It makes more sense to me to include “need-aware but meet needs if admitted” schools in the list than the latter. In other words, don’t just ignore need aware schools. Especially when there could be a compelling story involved, which sounds like OP’s might be. (I think, for example, that NYU would be very interested in a student like this.)
Yes, I think sometimes meets need/need aware for International colleges can be as good or better bets to actually generate the needed offer as meets need/need blind colleges. But to know which might be like that, you need more information. You can get a lot of potentially useful information out of their Common Data Sets, but then they sometimes change policies.
So, this is sort of circling back to this conversation being premature, outside of basic orientation. Assuming the OP does apply to US colleges in the future, by that point we can help use current data and their budget to suggest better bets. But right now, it isn’t really possible to nail down such a list, which is fine.
One thing that I might have hinted at above but that is worth saying very clearly: Your highly competitive private high school is full of very competitive students. However, they are high school students. They do not have extensive experiences in life. They do not necessarily know what is needed to attend highly ranked universities, nor to do very well in life. Take whatever they are doing and whatever they are saying with what we in North America might refer to as “a grain of salt”, meaning do not assume that you need to get caught up in the highly competitive race. Take things at your own pace and trust that this will work out one way or another.
You do not need to take any classes outside of school. Macroeconomics for example was something that I took as a university student. You really can wait and take this after you get to university, or just not take it at all (depending upon what career you end up being interested in – for international relations it does seem like a course you should take at some point, but that point does not need to be when you are in high school).
If you are interested in economics, I might add that I was a math major who took one single non-math elective in graduate school, which was econometrics. There is a lot of math in econometrics. Even as a math major it had me spending a Saturday afternoon making sure that I remembered my linear algebra well enough to handle the class. Apparently multi-variate calculus also shows up in economics, and probability and statistics also seem quite relevant. As a person who might major in a field that draws somewhat upon economics, it might also be useful to take math classes quite seriously (although it sounds like you are already doing this). I by the way liked econometrics quite a bit partly because to me it seems to start to take economics out of the “my opinion, your opinion” area into something that can be quantitatively verified.
You do not need to take the SAT exam as a sophomore in high school. It is way more usual to take it towards the end of your junior year or the beginning of your senior year of high school. Some take it over the summer in between. While your English appears to be excellent, if English is not your first language it is likely to be even stronger when you get to your junior and senior years of high school compared to right now.
With your coming from Ukraine, currently living in Canada, and thinking about universities in the US, another issue comes to mind: Where do you intend to end up living ten or twenty years from now? Attending university in the US will not allow you to stay in the US after graduation. Normally international students who graduate from university in the US are required to return to their home country, or at least somewhere outside the US, after graduation. Also, at least in my experience Canadian employers seem to prefer to hire graduates from the excellent universities in Canada rather than hire Canadians who graduate from universities in the US, even top ranked schools. There is understandably at this point a great deal of sympathy for Ukrainians in both the US and Canada, but none of us can know at this point whether this would help you to be allowed to live in the US after graduation. This is a largely political issue and politics in the US (and probably elsewhere) is very difficult or impossible to predict far in advance.
I will admit that I very much hope that well before you graduate university the war in Ukraine will end with Russia completely leaving Ukraine and going home. Hopefully this will allow you to return to Ukraine and help with what is likely to be a huge rebuilding effort, if you choose to do so. However, this is again something that is very hard to predict in advance.
If your intention is to end up in Canada long term, it might be a better plan to get your bachelor’s degree in Canada, and then think about whether you want to get some form of graduate degree in the US. This would allow someone taking a cursory look at your resume to at least see some connection to Canada at first glance. I used to know or work with quite a few people who did this, including two people who got their bachelor’s in Canada and then got a master’s at Stanford, and one person who got their bachelor’s in Canada and then got a master’s and a PhD at Princeton. I also have known several people who got their graduate degrees (or is currently getting their degree) at other very good universities in the US after getting a bachelor’s in Canada, and I know one person who went the other way (bachelor’s in the US, law degree in Canada).
Fortunately you have a lot of time to think about this. To me it looks like you are doing very well right now.
And best wishes for you and for Ukraine.
The 10 Need-Blind, Full-Need Universities for Internationals
Amherst College: A leading liberal arts college in Massachusetts.
Bowdoin College: Located in Maine, expanded its need-blind policy to international students in 2022.
Brown University: Ivy League university in Rhode Island.
Dartmouth College: Ivy League institution in New Hampshire.
Harvard University: Ivy League research university in Massachusetts.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): Renowned STEM institution in Massachusetts.
Princeton University: Ivy League research university in New Jersey.
University of Notre Dame: Catholic research university in Indiana.
Washington and Lee University: Private liberal arts college in Virginia.
Yale University: Ivy League research university in Connecticut. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
These schools are the ones that are both need blind for admissions AND meet full need for all accepted international students.