How To Get Into Dream College
Hi Monkeys, I am currently going into my senior year of high school. I am looking at colleges and I have always been heavily interested in finance for a while now. I have been on WSO for about 8 months now. My high schools stats are average at best, I have a 3.5 GPA. First semester of high school really hurt my GPA I got a 2.3. With average grades the schools I could get into would be recognizable non-targets like SMU, Baruch, University of Wisconsin, University of Illinois, and other schools in that ball park. Like anyone else on WSO I want the best shot at a high finance job. My question is how can I best stand out in college apps. For extracurricular's I play basketball and golf for the school. Like I said earlier in the post I have a big interest in finance. I want to stand out to top-tier university's like NYU or UT-Austin. I have been thinking of ways and I have thought about sending in some excel models I have made. I have also thought about making a equity research paper and making a investment thesis. Would these help? If yes by how much? Please be brutaly honest with me. If you guys have any other recommendations to stand out of colleges to apply for please let me know. Thanks!
Start an investment club, run a student managed portfolio, and kick some ass. Good luck to you!
Thank you for the response and thanks for the idea!
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Thank you for the response I will definitely try to get close with a few teachers do you have any tips on getting a 4.0 I honestly tried as hard as I could last year and got a 3.7
Don’t worry too much about bad freshman year grades. Colleges put less weightage on that, so you still have a shot at higher tier universities.
Thank you for the response I have heard some top colleges like UCLA don’t count the first semester I will find some others!
my friend got into NYU with a 3.6
Really? Do you know might have helped him stand out?
I would focus on tangible accomplishable tasks that can boost your app. Such as acing your senior year of college, crushing your essays, getting great recommendation letters, maybe starting a HS student investment club as someone else mentioned where you discuss mkts 1x a week, etc....
I'd caution against writing an equity research paper on your own, only for the sake of writing one. You're a senior in HS, unless you have an experienced mentor to help guide you through the process, it would be a challenging project to complete successfully. Also the issue is, write a research paper to what end? You wrote a paper on your own and....? The end goal is questionable as there's no judgement of its merit. However, if you can find a high school student contest that asks for papers like this (no idea if this even exists), it's a totally different story. Then it comes down to writing a paper to win the contest and discussing it in your apps and if you think you have a good chance to win given your time constraints/background. Or if you couple this w/ the HS student investment club you founded, that's a different story.
Best of luck.
If you know you want to do finance, apply to a range of schools that all have good placement. Not all semi-target schools are equally difficult to get into. Don't spend time applying to schools that don't have a finance club. Some helpful diligence will be just to look up each schools finance organizations to see where the current class is heading. You'd be surprised how well some schools place. You can break in from just about anywhere regardless, but do yourself a favor and go where there is at least some traction.
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