u/ImCrazy9308

i am a senior who committed to emory university's oxford campus. for background, i am from ohio in an upper-middle class area. the college admissions process truly put me through it and to be honest i am not 100% thrilled with the school i chose. however, emory oxford was the best school i got into---i got waitlisted at wake forest, emory main campus, rejected from duke, rejected from vandy ed1, rejected from washu ed2...accepted to in-state safeties. i went into college admissions overly confident because i overestimated how much admissions officers actually care about academics. my test scores are a 36 act (took only once), 1570 sat (1560 raw score, took twice), and my gpa as of seventh semester was 4.483 w and i think 3.99 uw. i was a national merit semifinalist/finalist, ap scholar with distinction (7 5s in calc ab, chem, csa, csp, apush, lang, and us gov), presidential scholar candidate (still waiting to hear back :/), etc. i knew from the start that my extracurriculars were a weak point in my application. i ran track freshman and sophomore year; i played jv soccer freshman year, then quit and learned field hockey, made varsity junior year and continued senior year. i was president of our school's competitive creative writing team, and had a decent amount of volunteer hours (nothing crazy). i worked summer jobs as a camp counselor and started my own tutoring business senior year through which i have taught students from 4th to 11th grade in nearly every subject. i took my senior year classes primarily at ohio state and have earned straight as. i thought my personal essay was pretty good but it must not have been. my supplemental essays were sort of copy-pasted from each school but i thought they were really strong. i was going in as a molecular bio major so my essays were about a genetic disease that runs in my family and how i plan to explore gene therapy in my career. some of my essays were also about that transition from soccer to field hockey. to be completely honest i have absolutely zero idea what more i could have done academically, i know extracurricular wise i definitely should have done more but for so long i didn't even know what i wanted to study in college that i couldn't tailor my ecs to my interests. and on top of that i was struggling with mental health issues all throughout high school and genuinely don't think i could've taken on these ecs that people have used to get into their schools. so i guess im wondering, what should i have done differently? and of course any future seniors can hopefully benefit from hearing this.