USAMO + SSP chud does pretty bad frfr
Demographics:
- Gender: Male
- Race/ethnicity: Asian (i know)
- Residence: suburbs, Tennessee
- Income: full pay
- Type of school: non-competitive public
- Hooks: rural??? maybe?? if not then nothing. (also on immigrant visa ~ H4 ~ so i'm considered international for most places)
Intended Major: Bioinformatics/Mathematics + Biochemistry
Academics:
- GPA: 4.00 UW / 4.8 W
- Rank: n/a ~ but probs 1
- # of APs: 17 by end of senior year, mostly 5s, 2 4s (seminar + US history)
- Senior Year: AP Chem, AP Research, AP Stats, AP CS A, AP CoGo, AP Macro Economics, DE Linear Algebra, and Honors Chem II (need it for AP Chem)
Standardized Testing:
- ACT: 36 (35, 36, 36, 36)
- PSAT: 1500 (enough for national merit)
- AP Scores: all fives in anything related to my major then 4s on seminar and APUSH
ECs:
- SSP BioChem - research on fungal inhibitors; applied as an international student because of visa issues (look above); was like 1 of 4 intl kids in my cohort
- research w/ an expert (works at an R&D company) - did computational biology research ie. computationally modeling molecules to serve as inhibitors for enzymes in the dengue virus (spent like 1 year on this; paper is currently review w/ me as 2nd author); worked with the guy on a patented technique for finding the amount of a certain compound (named inventor); one other study w/ me as second author
- Math Club Prez - straight forward; was in the club for 4 years, started a few things & a math contest for fifth graders
- research w/ an expert (actual professor) - more research; this time was more on machine learning, I personally was just the data guy; got 1x paper out of this, currently being published (on lung cancer; 2nd author)
- MUN/YIG - school prez + state officer (won't tell u which conference); grew my school club from 4 people to ~30 (crazy) & taught a bunch on speech and debate (like 7 of the kids I taught won awards)
- bootcamp/hackathon director - started a mini student initiative (almost a non-profit) that has hosted 2x bootcamps on vibe coding ( i know this is goofy) and 1x hackathon; overall we've reached like 800 people from 23+ countries
- research w/ a local professor - working on a project on predicting the way wildfires will spread using time data (pretty cool); no paper or anything yet but the project is really fun; got the chance to pitch idea to ~19 faculty/ students
- BJJ - Brazilian jiu-jitsu ~ blue belt (5 years of practice) & won a few state medals + assistant coach for a bit; recently quit cause the coach was a jerk
- YouTube - grew a youtube shorts soccer channel to 400 subs and 100k views; obsessed with this during 8th and 9th grade
Awards:
- 1x USAMO Qual (this year too, but only a few schools were updated)
- 2x AMC 12 DHR (this year and last year; got perfect score 150/150 this year)
- 1x USAJMO Qual (sophomore year)
- 1x AMC 10 DHR
- Stem fest champion (1/2 in my state and like 1/106 in country) ~ pretty fun cause 1 week in DC
- World Science Scholar (1/15 in USA and 1/52 in world from >10k apps)
- National Merit Finalist (only 1 in school and 1 of 6 in district)
- Additional Info: congressional app challenge winner, top 8 in state for QuizBowl, ISEF finalist alternate (so close, yet so far), 3x AIME (including this year)
Essays/LORs/Other:
AP Calc Teacher (10/10) - read the letter and it was absolutely great, basically said that I was one of the best math students, leaders, and researchers
English (seminar/research) Teacher (5/10) - not good/not bad; read it and it basically said I was a good researcher and peer
Counselor (8/10) - lk loves me; say that i'm one the best students she's ever had; literally told me she had a hard time making my rec letter one page
Research Prof from EC #1 - allowed me to write it and approved it after; I GLAZED myself
Research Prof from SSP - i think he liked me; talked a lot and we bonded over that
Essays (7.5/10) - common app (7/10): about becoming more human, less analytical; supplementals (mostly good ~ 8/10)
Interviews so far:
MIT (7/10) - was 3.5 hours long and practically an interrogation (did make some jokes)
Duke (9/10) - some guy working at Vandy, was absolutely great...I loved it
Harvard (7/10) - had some scheduling issues, was lk pretty good (talked about politics at one point)
Princeton (6/10) - you'll see what happened w/ this one
Schools/Results:
EA:
Princeton REA - Rejected
Georgia Tech - Deferred (applied CS)
UIUC (CS + BME) - Rejected
University of Tennessee Knoxville - Accepted + Full Ride w/ Haslam Scholars
University of Alabama - Accepted + Full Ride w/ National Merit
RD:
Purdue - Accepted
University of Wisconsin (Madison) - Accepted
UCSD - Accepted
UCLA - Accepted
Johns Hopkins BME - Accepted
University of Maryland - Accepted
Georgia Tech (CS) - Accepted
Carnegie Melon (SCS) - Waitlisted
Duke - Waitlisted
Columbia - Waitlisted
Harvard - Waitlisted
University of Michigan - Waitlisted
Vanderbilt University - Waitlisted
Caltech - Rejected
MIT - Rejected
Yale - Rejected
Cornell - Rejected
UPenn - Rejected
Stanford - Rejected
Berkely - Rejected
Comments:
One piece of advice: stuff is stupid...please don't listen to people on reddit about what programs are good or bad. SSP apparently has a bad rep this year, but my cohort had 6 people get into Stanford, 3 into Princeton, 4 into Yale, 2 into Caltech, and a bunch more. Frankly speaking I likely had results in the bottom 3 or 4 kids in my cohort .
I'm not rly proud of where I got in and comparison is killing me...being international is hard and i'm lk done w/ it.
Lastly, always hedge your bets. If you really like a school, apply ED; don't wait for RD.