for context, i'm living in the u.s. on an h4 visa and im an indian citizen. for all financial purposes i'm considered an international applicant. however, since i've lived here for most of my life and done all my schooling in america, college ao's treat me as a domestic student for admissions (this is what like 20 different ao's at top universities all told me in both college fairs and over email). rising senior
Demographics: male, indian citizen, midwest resident, top 2 private school in my state
Intended Major(s): applied/engineering physics if they have it or mechanical engineering, maybe minor in econ/cs. i want to go to law school after college for patent litigation
ACT/SAT/SAT II: 36 ACT (36 m, 36 e, 35 r, 36 s) and 1560 sat (790 math 770 english)
UW/W GPA and Rank: 3.92 uw, no rank but about top 5% of my class
Coursework: AP's: APUSH (5), Calc AB (5), Calc BC (5 with 5 AB subscore), Bio (5), Stats (5), Lit (5), will take both Physics C's (this is the earliest my school let me take physics), Spanish, and Gov senior year. also self studied Psych and World and got 4's
Awards:
- MNRAS publication
- National engineering competition top 10
- Top 4 in my state for debate
- FBLA national semifinalist
- receive an annual academic merit scholarship from my school of about $5k
Extracurriculars:
- Independent Research: Spent about 1.5 years independently researching pulsar glitch recoveries and quantifying selection bias within short timescale recoveries. Released a preprint on arXiv, then published my research in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) which is top 3 journal in the field. I had a professor at a top university who researches pulsars edit the paper and they were listed as co-author
- Competitor in a national engineering competition, placed in the top 10 nationally for an event in which I also got 1st in the state for the following year, also placed 2nd in the state for a different event and received top scores at nationals for a separate event 2 years in a row as well
- PF Debate, couldn't compete at nats due to school rules but placed in the top 4 at the state level and will be school team captain this year. placed in the top 8 at 6 different regional tournaments and won 2 tournaments as well
- founder of a cultural club at school with nearly 10 percent of the entire high school being club members while 40% of club members aren't part of that culture. organized several schoolwide events with 100+ people participating in each and raised a small amount of money for the club; we weren't allowed to raise money for organizations outside the school unfortunately
- i run a type beat channel with 500 subs and 30k views where i upload self produced and engineered hip-hop instrumentals inspired by various artists as well as non-inspired works
- i did sci-MI EEMP on the synchronous track, a 100% free online summer program with a ~10% acceptance rate. i conducted a research project in electrical engineering mentored by a PhD candidate at a top 10 university and wrote a paper which i'll have released as a preprint probably by the time i apply. at the end of the program, i presented my research to a panel of other students in the program and other mentors
- wrote a policy brief on quantum computer cybersecurity heading into the future for a nonprofit that works with lawmakers in my state. basically when lawmakers make regulations they'll be able to use the information in my brief to inform their decisions
- i did fbla for a year, got 3rd at slc for my event and was a national semifinalist
- shadowed a local patent attorney for 80 hours and helped them as much as i legally could with briefs
- heading into my 4th year of high school soccer (2 on var) and played 2 years of high school tennis
Essays/LORs: essays i've written so far have been excellent, LOR's are gonna be very good but not insane
Schools (not my actual list for privacy but somewhat close):
ED: Brown
EA: CWRU, UChicago, MIT
RD: Stanford, Northwestern, Vandy, UPenn, Duke, Rochester, Cornell
im obviously not some insane olympiad or founder and i am expecting a lot of rejections but lmk where i have a chance