Hi! I’m a Turkish high school junior applying from Ankara. Stats: SAT 1570, IELTS 8.0, AP Calc BC 5 (self-studied, my school doesn’t offer APs). I have a 94/100 GPA.
On the research/EC side: I’m a first-author on an IEEE-published paper (Quantum AI 2025) and have a second first-authored paper accepted to IEEE WCCI’26; also submitted a couple of papers to NeurIPS/COLM. I served as a reviewer for ICLR’26, ICML’26 and NeurIPS’26. I worked as a Research Engineer at an EdTech AI startup (partnering with Mark Cuban’s Test Prep company, the US’s 3rd biggest) and am a founding engineer at a Y Combinator S25 voice AI startup (raising $4M pre-seed/seed). I co-founded an AI chess coaching platform partnered with the Turkish Chess Federation. I’m a 3x TEKNOFEST (Türkiye’s international tech competition) finalist (top 1% in AI in Healthcare and AI in Aviation) and have top 2–3% Kaggle rankings. This summer, I’ll be conducting research with one MIT PhD, and one Stanford PhD Turkish professors, and will try to get some rec letters from them.
I know my standardized testing is slightly below Stanford's and the other T20 schools' typical range and the lack of school-offered APs is a real constraint; just trying to get an honest read on where I stand. Any insight appreciated!