- Nora Sun
Tags: UCLA
Institution: University of California Los Angeles
Study: Major in biochemistry
High School Experience
I’d say my high school experience was pretty good overall - i really liked most of my teachers and my classes, as they prepared me very well for upcoming tests and AP tests, etc. I also really enjoyed the extracurricular programs, especially the badminton team and interact club (a volunteering club), that allowed me to enjoy activities that were related to school outside of academia. Some things I didn’t like includes the way our classes are scheduled, as we’d alternate between block days and “regular” days which made doing things in a daily routine a bit irritating.
AP/IBs
I took AP World History, AP English Literature, AP Calculus AB & BC, AP Biology, AP Chinese, and AP Chemistry. I only know the results of Calculus AB, Literature, Chemistry, and World, where I got all 4s and above.
GPA
All A’s besides the first semester of AP Literature and AP Chemistry.
Standardized Testing
ACT: 36
SAT Math II: 800
SAT Chemistry: 800
Extracurriculars
I mainly participated in a volunteering club called interact club and the badminton team at school + badminton club outside of school. The only leadership position I held was captainship of our school badminton team for the 2019-2020 season.
Recommendations
I had pretty good relationships with the teachers who wrote my recommendation letters, as I noticed they did seem to quite like me and were very nice to me.
Essays
I generally wrote about my various experiences that I had from moving all over the world and how this shaped me into the person I am today.
Strengths
Personally, I think the way I managed to package and present myself made me a pretty strong applicant alongside my good test score. After all my 10-11 gpa wasn’t that high, and I didn’t have especially strong extracurriculars.
Advice
Circumstances
The best advice I could probably give is to try and focus on the presentation of your application with the statistics you have. If you can make yourself stand out to application officers, I’d say you stand a pretty good chance at getting into a good college.
Why?