Background: Black guy, competitive high school in suburban/affluent area
Stats: 1510 PSAT (760R 750M), 1560 SAT (760R, 800M), 35 ACT (this didn't come out until way after deadlines)
6 total APs (all 5s), 7 IB courses + 1 current AP | 5 DE
GPA: ~4.67 w, 4.0 uw
ECs:
- Lead Developer, ML and music-related app. Tried to get this off the ground before application deadlines but lowk failed. Working with a few freelancers. 2.5 yrs
- Summer CS research + 6 months of additional work on the paper. Ghosted by my prof so my team never got published 😭
- School rep on district-wide advisory council. Advised some AI usage regulation that impacted 10k students. 1 yr
- Principal trombonist of local youth orch + statewide orch, 3 years
- Varsity + club swim, 7 years.
- Class president, 3 years.
- CS club director of student engagement. Planned some fun C++ challenges. 1 yr
- VP & Innovation Director of schoolwide org managing all clubs. Developed an extracurricular program with JavaScript that allows students to organize their own lectures 😁😁
- A variety of community service activities: founded a flag service committee, lead our school's student tours team, volunteer at local library
Awards:
- National FBLA placer in CS-related event + 2-time state winner
- Invited to perform at Carnegie Hall
- Technology Student Association state champ in CS-related event
- PVSA
- Hall of fame for statewide student council org
Essays: spent at least 3 weeks on all + got as much review as possible. My earliest ones (RSI) were genuinely terrible, but by the time I got to the spring they were pretty good. Tried to focus on my love for my diff communities and how I serve them with my leadership/CS skills.
LORs: Pretty good, I think 😅 I've worked with almost all of my recommenders in some capacity, so we have good relationships.
Results 💔
NYO-USA: rejected. Expected, but it still hurt (this was my 2nd time applying)
RSI: rejected lmao
MITES: rejected
State senate page program: accepted and committed! Beyond excited for this.
Simons SRP: rejected
Clark Scholars: rejected
Carnegie Mellon Precollege: accepted!
Cornell Precollege (online): accepted w/ full scholarship!!!
Governor's school: accepted!
Takeaways: I had planned to apply to a whole bunch more (SEAP, LLrise, Wolfram, Penn Engineering, BWSI, LLcipher, sci-MI, DBound) but I got into gov school before those were due so I saw no point lol. I'm def very thankful for where I did get into. I realized halfway through my Clark application that I was also interested in pubpol research, so my biggest recommendation to any future summer program hopefuls is to do a lot of reflection early on, before you start applying to places. I probably would have applied to a lot less research and some more advocacy-based programs if I had reflected earlier.
Good luck to you all!