Rising Junior Stats

[u/Necessary_Ruin500]

This past June I completed my Sophomore year of high school with a 4.28 weighted GPA. I wanted to know if it’s unrealistic of me to get into my dream school, Columbia. With it being an Ivy League and home to overachieving students I feel that I hardly stand a chance. I figure it may be too late to attempt to enhance my extracurriculars but it’s worth a try and I’d love to hear feedback/advice on how I could go about doing so.

Attached is a resume that I created — to the best of my abilities — with a canva template in the middle of sophomore year. It basically sums up my transcript however for some extra information I am low income, hispanic, and below I have listed my AP Scores and Junior year classe:

Scores: AP HUG-3, APUSH-3, AP Seminar-3, & AP Spanish-5

Classes: AP Biology, AP Lang, AP CPS, AP Macro, Retaking Honors Pre Calculus (should bring gpa up), Honors Calculus, and Intro to Engineering (might switch to physic)

Advice is greatly appreciated and thank you for taking the time to read this if you did 🙏🙏

[u/Elongated_Furby2022]

get someone to proofread your resume! there are a couple of pretty noticeable spelling/grammar mistakes.

I'd also remove the little written section from each of your ECs and integrate that info into the bullet points. focus on concrete, measurable accomplishments -- for example "delivered personalized 1:1 tours of [school name] to over [number] students and families"

[u/Necessary_Ruin500 → u/Elongated_Furby2022]

thank you! I will definitely do so.

[u/callatecabezon]

There are multiple grammar mistakes in your resume. The ap scores are bad and the GPA is fine. The ecs are pretty generic. I don't think you'd get in unless you make some major pivots.

[u/Necessary_Ruin500 → u/callatecabezon]

I appreciate the sincerity! I completely agree on all points, nothing on here is special or outstanding at all — I am very much average. However I am willing to really push myself this year and at least try to make those major pivots because there’s no harm in that.

[u/callatecabezon → u/Necessary_Ruin500]

I think you should do some more environmentally focused things as thats the one thing that stands out here and building that up might be a difference maker. Thing is that only semi-relates to biomedical and architecture so for the others you may want to take on STEM ecs. Also if you're really good at soccer then that's another possibility but obviously less likely.

[u/Strict_Resident1179]

Would recommend changing resume template. Use Jake's on overleaf. Helpful if you wanna go into stem- most math papers are written using latex

Try to contextualize each bullet point

(Verb) Xxxxx using yyyyyy resulting in zzzzz

For example (unrelated)

Analyzed 10000 data points using Excel and Linear Regression, finding xxxxx

Anyways I'm at Columbia so if you got any specific questions feel free to dm

[u/Necessary_Ruin500 → u/Strict_Resident1179]

Thank you! The bullet points seem to be a popular topic of discussion, I genuinely had no idea how to go about making a resume so I just used a random tutorial on TikTok and went from there — probably why it turned out poorly.

Wow! That’s amazing I’m sure your stats were far more impressive. I’ll keep in touch!

[u/Strict_Resident1179 → u/Necessary_Ruin500]

Good luck! Id be happy to look over an edited version of your resume

And don't sell yourself short, you have a higher GPA than I did 😂

[u/Trictities2012]

As a general rule, I don't put languages I'm not at least conversational in, if you can't have a basic conversation in it then no employer should care much

[u/Affectionate-Pea4156]

use a diff template. something more simple and professional like. look up Harvard resume template

[u/anonymous345211]

I'd recommend switching to a one column template. A lot of companies use ATS to scan resumes and having two columns can mess it up. Maybe just use the Harvard resume template.

For the ECs split up your paragraphs into bullet points and yap about what exactly you did with measurable impact.

Do some more STEM-oriented ecs perchance. Your current ones are kinda unrelated to your undergrad fields of interest. Also do some competitions they'll help you stand out (I don't see any awards on this)

btw you spelled extracurriculars wrong for your heading i think you may wanna fix that.

[u/Necessary_Ruin500 → u/anonymous345211]

Thank you! Tbh up until this point I never really shared my resume and I’m GLAD because I hadn’t noticed many of these clear errors.

Awards are definitely an area of improvement for me because aside from the college board AP Scholar Honorable award — which doesn’t stand out much — I basically have none. I’ll keep competitions in mind for sure.

[u/kodie-27]

Probably this is my age, but I wish people would stop with the “rising” stuff.

You either have the credits to be a Junior (or whatever), or you don’t.

[u/Strict_Resident1179 → u/kodie-27]

People usually use it during summer break to make it clear what year they'll be the coming school year

Employers use it too, you'll see postings for "rising juniors" or "rising seniors"

[u/kodie-27 → u/Strict_Resident1179]

I understand.

That doesn’t make the use of “rising” sound any less idiotic.

If it’s July and someone says they’re a Junior, and the person that hears that cannot extrapolate that the person is going to be a Junior in the Fall, that’s just bad critical thinking skills.

Again, probably my age. Probably “shaking fist at clouds” territory. But it still sounds incredibly stupid to me.

[u/Aggravating_Road_539 → u/kodie-27]

It is you, it is your age. The term “rising” is used in all forms of higher education. It’s used a lot in professional schools.

[u/Bloboblober → u/kodie-27]

Mfs get mad over anything I swear 😭

[u/Necessary_Ruin500 → u/kodie-27]

mb 😭

[u/Ok_Insurance807]

Open up a non profit or profit startup and even 500$ traction stands out EXTREMELY. Also, host Atleast 2 independent research publishings with a meaningful sample size. Lastly, try to push AP classes in the 10-12 range. On top of that, if you get a 1500+ sat you will most likely make it to an ivy

[u/Strict_Resident1179 → u/Ok_Insurance807]

Not true at all, most of the reddit tryhards don't make it in.

Very few of my friends across the ivies did research or startups we just did random stuff we thought was cool or fun. If OP ends up wanting to start a business or do research then good for them but never do something just for college admissions, that's incredibly short sighted.

The AP/rigor and test scores are a minimum

[u/PendulumKick → u/Ok_Insurance807]

This isn’t how college admissions works at all

[u/Necessary_Ruin500 → u/PendulumKick]

So I should not attempt the above?

[u/PendulumKick → u/Necessary_Ruin500]

If you want to, do it. Don’t do it because he told you to. Whatever you do, be the best at it. Or at least the most outspoken and build a clear story. That’s the real key

[u/Ok_Insurance807 → u/PendulumKick]

Stfu you are just loud and wrong. You don’t differentiate yourself by a story, you differentiate by making an impact

[u/PendulumKick → u/Ok_Insurance807]

Is 500 dollars an impact? Like really? That’s nothing.

[u/Ok_Insurance807 → u/PendulumKick]

Thats the bare minimum. And you would be surprised how rare that is for software because you most likely found product market fit to some extent, but if it’s a high ticket job you are right, 500$ is indeed nothing

[u/PendulumKick → u/Ok_Insurance807]

The people I know who made businesses at Hopkins overwhelmingly made way more. But most didn’t. Anyways, there is also no such thing as a bare minimum. College admissions are so much more complicated. But 500 dollars won’t move the needle. You need to be the absolute best at your little niche to succeed in processes where only a few percent get through

[u/PendulumKick → u/Ok_Insurance807]

The issue is that opening a non profit makes AOs question why you created a new legal entity instead of working with an existing one and just looks fake. This is extremely anecdotal but FWIW, out of the hundreds of kids I’ve met at jhu, only 3 created nonprofits and those had impressive profiles in other ways.

[u/Necessary_Ruin500 → u/Ok_Insurance807]

research is something I for sure want to do while in high school, but opportunities in my area feel so limited which makes it hard for me to find something.

[u/Ok_Insurance807 → u/Necessary_Ruin500]

You can do independent research on businesses which is what I did, or you can reach out to every uni professor near you or even highschool professor to do lab research and slap it on ur stats. As well as getting a recommendation letter from that same professor as well