my high school STATS + ADVICE / how I got into UCLA, Berkeley, etc / *SAT, GPA, extracurriculars*

hi guys welcome back to my channel so let's talk college in today's video I'll be going through my high school stats these are the stats that helped me get into UCLA UC Berkeley and some other schools almost right here and now I did not apply to any Ivy's because I knew I want to study on the west coast I'll be going over the classes I took in high school live test scores so like SAT and AP exams and then also be talking about the extracurriculars I did so the time stamps for each of those three categories will be listed below I just finished my freshman year at UCLA so not too long ago I was doing the whole college application process and trust me I know how much of a struggle it could be it is a lot of work but I mean looking back now I know it was all worth it so yes I thought I'd make this video because I know that for me when I was applying to colleges I was really interested to see kind of like what stats got other people into certain schools but before I begin I just want to preface by saying I'm not guaranteeing admission to any certain college with these stats these are just the stats that I had and it's what worked for me but of course college admissions is such a toss-up and there's no cookie cutter perfect way to get into a certain college so we'll work for one person might not work for another person I also want to say in no way am I trying to brag or flex or anything like that not that I really have that much to flex but I just want to give you guys some perspective so please don't feel bad if your stats are the same on me or something so yes just want to preface by saying that so without further ado let's get right on to the video all right starting off with my high school first I'm gonna give you some background as to what my high school is like I went to a private college prep high school in the state of Washington my high school was very very competitive there were so many smart people migrated to give you a little bit more context my school is ranked the number two private school in Washington State with the number 1 kind of school being the school about Bill Gates went to so yeah there's not really much to compete there but yeah that just puts into perspective that my high school was very competitive and my school is also really small I'd say there's about 70 ish people per grade the grading system at my high school was a bit different so instead of the letter scale where you get like a species etc we had a scale from 0 to 100 so in that way we also didn't really have like the classic GPA like 4.0 or 3.5 or something our GPA that we submitted to colleges was on the scale of 0 to 100 so out of 100 my GPA was 93 and that is the unweighted score and then my school also didn't rank students so there was no class ranking in terms of classes so I'm sure that the main thing you probably want to know it's like what AP classes I took this is another thing that my high school is pretty different so we had a maximum of three APs we could take each year which I know is like different than my friends who go to public schools who take like five eight-piece every year but yeah I'm not sure the exact reason why my high school capped it at three atps per year but I don't know anyone took more than three ApS if anything the average I would say most people take her out to atps per year so that's what I did I took to a piece my junior year and then to a piece my senior year we did have honors classes though so I took some honors classes throughout my time in high school from like nine through twelfth grade overall I would say I was a pretty good student I worked really really hard at school always make sure I did my homework and I stayed on top of assignments except for 1b I did get all A's throughout my high school career before I go into depth I'll just show you the general classes I took so here's my senior classes and then my school was on the semester system so we had grades for first semester and second semester here's my junior year classes my sophomore year classes and that my freshman year classes so going back to AP classes in my senior year I took AP calc BC and AP econ I did not take the AP econ exam honestly just because towards under the year I had already heard back from colleges and I just got really lazy I wish I'd taken the AP exams so I don't have to take intro econ courses now that I'm at UCLA but I did take the AP calc BC exam though and that one I scored a three wasn't very proud of that I think I could have done better if I studied more but again as I said my senioritis hit really hard towards the end of the year and not gonna lie bc calc is that was rough my senior year I also did an independent study it's basically a class where you make the curriculum by yourself and you have a teacher to guide you but for the most part you're just like teaching yourself or like learning from the textbook or online so the independent study that I did was Japanese and I did that because my school didn't offer Japanese and I want to take it and from what my college counselor told me taking an impending study would be great to write on my called resume because it shows that you have initiative you're willing to learn and have that independence to pursue and study so I decided like why not I want to learn Japanese anyways and I have an extra free period so I did that in senior year as well my junior year I took AP Lang and Composition and I also took AP calc ap for the AP calc AP exam I scored a 5 and then for the AP English Language and Composition exam I scored a 4 sophomore freshman year I didn't take any APs which is typical for my high school maybe someone might take like one AP sophomore year but for the most part people will take two to three APs in their junior and senior year at my school but sophomore year I did take honors math so that was honors pre calc and then freshman year I took honors math as well so that was honors algebra 2 alright moving into the Test section so most colleges will either require that you submit the SAT or the a CT I submitted the SAT with Si not all schools require si but I took it and I thought I did well so I decide submit it anyways starting my sophomore year I took the PSAT which is kind of like a practice SAT and then the practice a CT and I just did that to see where my baseline score was and to see how much I can improve with studying and also recommend doing this so that you can see what kind of format you like better like whether you like the SAT format better or the a CT format better because they are very very different and sometimes just one style works better for a certain person so for me personally I thought the SAT worked a lot better and then my scores pretty much came out with quibbling when I took the practice exams so I just had to go with the SAT by doing that you can slowly focus all your energy on preparing for one exam and that way you're not like splitting your energy like 50% to the SAT and 50% to the a CT because in the end you only have to submit one to colleges anyways so yes I'd highly recommend seeing which one works well for you and then going with that going all in studying for that exam and then submitting that exam score the SAT scores I ended up submitting in my application was a fourteen sixty and the breakdown for that was seven hundred for the reading and writing section and then 760 for math and my essay score total was a twenty but let me tell you that score did not come easy it took a while to get there I studied a lot for the SAT first I was never a good test taker was not blessed with the test taking genes and honestly I don't think in the end my test score is what got me into certain schools I think will really show them through my application was the extracurricular section and the essays that I wrote so if you're interested and you want me to go into more depth about my UC application or my common app application or just just some like general test prep or college app skills and I'd love to make that video so just let me know in the comments below but yes back to testing so wasn't that strong with test taker the first I took the PSAT in my sophomore year I scored a 1119 I had no idea what this meant I didn't know if it was a good score or Beth's or my parents didn't go to undergrad in the United States so if they didn't take the SAT so no one in my family really knew like how to gauge whether that was a good or bad score but as I said I went to a very competitive high school so people were talking about what scores they got on there pSATS so I soon realized that I had a lot of work to do so after that throughout the rest of my sophomore year the summer after my sophomore year and then into my junior year I worked with an SAT tutor but by no means do I think that you need to hire tutor in or can improve your score there's so many free online resources for example like Khan Academy but yes for me I worked with an SAT tutor we met I would say like two to three hours every week and outside of our sessions I would do homework and practice problems and like an SAT test prep book I've worked on that I'd say like three to five hours every week so as I said I did this throughout my sophomore year and then I took the PSAT again at the beginning of junior year I was really happy to see that my PSAT score had increased it had gone to 813 60 but this was a PSAT score so I still need to take the real SAT so I took my first real SAT exam in March of my junior year that one I scored a 13-6 again so the same score is my PSAT exam I improved a lot over the past year but I still felt like I could do better so I kept studying and I took the SAT again in May of my junior year and that was exam where I scored 814 60 and I was happy with the score so I just had to submit that one I definitely would recommend that you take the SAT or a CT whatever exam you're submitting that you take the exam more than one time because every time you take the exam it's going to be different different questions are going to be asked so just by probability you're going to do better on one exam than the other and the more exams I take the more exam scores that you have so you can send the best one that you get also another reason why I highly recommend taking the test more than once is because a lot of schools will super score super score is basically where they take top score from each category so let's say you do better in the reading and writing section of the first time you take the exam but you do better in the math section the second time you take the exam so super scoring will allow you to take that best score from one section and the best score from another section and combine those two sent to your colleges however I would also recommend that you don't take the exam so many times that you get burnt out because exams are really long they can be really tiring and at a certain point you'll just see that your exam scores will plateau and there's not really any extra benefit of taking the exam like 10 times my college counselor told me that the sweet spot is to take it 2 to 4 times so just keep that in mind when you're preparing and signing out for the exams in terms of SAT Subject Tests i actually didn't take any luckily all the schools I applied to did not require the SAT Subject Tests so thank God because a lot of my friends had to take those exams and just extra work and they said it was a struggle so I'm very thankful I did not have to take those and then I already said what AP exam scores I got earlier when I was talking about my classes but just as a summary I'll just list them right here now moving beyond the numbers and going into my extracurriculars usnea I was pretty involved in high school the first thing that I listed was that as part of the varsity golf team and I was in this for freshmen and sophomore and junior year and then I was team captain in my junior year so that's definitely something I made sure to include in my application I did a variety of clubs throughout my high school career but I'd say my main Club was during my senior year I was one of the co-leaders of forefront Club which was my high school's mental health club besides putting in my extracurricular section I also wrote about it in my essays so I talked about a different workshop salute lead or what kind of initiatives we would do around campus to increase mental health awareness I also had a job that I started at the end of my junior year I was a cashier at Target and so I worked a lot throughout the summer between my junior and senior year I say worked around like 20-ish hours and then I also worked throughout my senior year but a lot less because I was busy with school I'd say that throughout the school year I worked around like and showers a week another thing I concluded it was my community service I've always been really passionate about community service so it's something that is pretty involved in throughout high school my freshman sophomore year I volunteered at my local food bank and I do that for two to three hours every week and my junior and senior year I worked with a variety of organizations with my main one being at a local like baby clothes donation center and then the last thing I have on extracurriculars list is I started in my own photography business so during my junior year I got really into photography and I noticed a lot of people were wanting just like photos of themselves or specifically like senior photos so yeah I just takes people's senior photos and charge them and I was able to make a business out of that it's a pretty small thing like compared to my other parts of my application but I still want to include it because I did want to major in business so by including that I could show my more like business side and kind of how I've explored that area of interest all right that is it for today's video I hope this gave you some more insight into the stats that I used and what got me into certain colleges I just want to emphasize that there are so many things that go into your application I really don't think there's one cookie cutter perfect way to get into college I would say overall the strong points of my application were the extracurriculars and the essays because essays I was able to use my voice to explain those extracurriculars I don't think the numbers like the grades or the SAT score that I had was anything like exceptional now times are so made smart people what really makes your application stand out is how you use your voice to show what you've accomplished and what you're passionate about and obviously again I'm not a call and admissions person so I can't say like oh this will definitely work or oh this won't work or something but I have gone through the entire culture admissions process and I'm here now I love the school that I go to so I hope this video was helpful for you guys if you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments below now that summer I'm planning on making some more applying to college videos so definitely subscribe if you'd like to see those also definitely feel free to let me know what certain types of videos you want so if that's like SAT prep or essay writing tips or just general common app or UC app application tips I would love to make videos about those two and yeah until then I hope you guys are staying happy and healthy and I'll see you guys in my next video why [Music]

Channel: lifeofmeili

Views: 16,649

Rating: 4.9519229 out of 5

Keywords: high school stats, ucla, berkeley, cal, how i got into college, college, advice, how to get into ucla, ivy league, how to get into ivy league, SAT, ACT, GPA, high school classes, classes, AP, AP classes, AP test, extracurriculars, college application, college app, tips, realistic, usc, grades, asian, uc app, california, improve sat score, improve act, 1500 sat, 35 act, stanford, college reaction, college stats, statistics, clubs, university, sat ivy league, act ivy league, sorority, common app

Id: H-fO0ciY9YU

Length: 14min 53sec (893 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 13 2020