I applied to 21 schools. I didn't really have a dream school, but I knew that I wanted to surround myself with ambitious people, and that's literally any top 20.

I was lucky enough to be admitted to Penn, GT, UVA, VT, W&M, and GMU. Honestly, my application season was quite the roller coaster. I was deferred from EA to MIT, and then deferred from GT and rejected from a lot of top schools early on, which made me pretty sad for a while. By Ivy day, I'd come to accept that I probably was just going to stay in-state, and then I just got extremely lucky.

ecs

I honestly only started "ec-maxxing" starting 2025 - the same damn year I applied to college, lol. In that window, I won 4th at ISEF, hit USACO plat, worked two internships - one at a startup, one corporate, flew out for startup conferences and events, published research, and qualified to IIOT (but didn't go). It really is not that hard to get "cracked", u js gotta larp.

stats (shows u how stupid i am)

gpa: 4.59 W, class rank: top 10% (outside of top 5% lmfaooo, looked rlly bad on apps), class size around 600

sat: 1540.Tried to retake once, and got 1520, so gave up lol.

essays

This was honestly fun but genuinely a horrendous grind. I got really good at writing, and literally read books on writing better. Issue I ran into was that my essays weren't really professional, they were sorta just me talking in my own voice, which for some reason I thought would work out, but got kinda fried for it, esp with the public schools lol.

Now, did I expect to get into penn? fuck no. Out of all the ivies, I thought I had the worst shot at it. A lot of people from my area applied ED, and there were also a bunch of legacy applicants. Also my essays were quite literally written in 4 hours max. Just shoot ur shotgun yall.

I'm not gonna leak my essays here, but if u want em, js email me and I gotchu. I cringe when I read them icl.

final words

College apps are stupid.