Does starting your own initiatives make up for a slightly lower GPA when applying for top schools?

Clearly you are an excellent student academically but I think you have made some wrong assumptions about Elite and Ivy colleges. They are all looking for self-motivated, high-achieving students that genuinely want to make the world a better place.

Copied from MIT's blog written by Dean Schmill

Be yourself!

The most important way to prepare for MIT is to focus on becoming your best self by pursuing your interests, your aptitudes, and your education. What you shouldn’t do is build your life, your education, and your expectations around the narrow goal of trying to get into MIT.

As our Dean Stu Schmill wrote:

In simple terms, we want students to pursue the things that interest them with energy and enthusiasm. We want students to make decisions that are educationally sound for them to best prepare them to succeed in college and beyond. We want students to challenge themselves appropriately in the areas that are most interesting to them. We want students to engage with their community in their pursuits. And, we want students who demonstrate strong ethical character. In short, we want young people to be students and community members first, and applicants second.

When I attended the in-person MIT intro session, the main takeaway was that if you operate as an island you will fail at MIT because they are looking for highly collaborative intellectually curious people who are social. Outside of rigorous classwork, 75% of MIT students belong to Greek Life and they have a work hard, play hard ethos. One thing they are extremely proud of is the annual "hack" event where the admin and faculty get surprised by some whacky antic on campus like putting a Boston Police Car on top of the great dome at the main building.

I think if would quite unusual for anyone applying to an Ivy of Elite college like MIT, NOT to have a portfolio of self-driven activities whether they are extensions of intellectual curiosity, passion projects or community service endeavors.

While I think your 3 different LGBTQ ideas are good ones, I caution you not to do them because of what you think the are worth on paper as a GPA boost but to pursue them because you truly believe in them. Someone reading your application file a year from now, will question why you waited until now to engage in a community you are interested in supporting. Many of these admits have been doing impressive activities from 9th or 10th grade and will have a head start on you. I would be more concerned about your "B" in AP Calculus since most successful admits, not only have aced AP Calc B/C but have taken either 1 or 2 add'l higher maths like Multivariable Algebra, Multi-variate Calc, Real Analysis, Stochastic processes or similar.

I would not conflate ECs with your academic narrative, or expect a boost unless you are David Hogg or Cameron Kasky who gained entry into the Ivy league in part from their viral activism from the Stoneman Douglass shootings. In most cases, any GPA dip can be made up up from taking the most challenging coursework, looking outside of HS and enrolling in online college courses, having a 1550+ SAT or 99%+ score (especially for MIT) and doing some research project or CS internship since that is what you are interested in majoring.

At the end of the day, MIT is a very very difficult school to succeed at since there isn't a lot of hand holding or academic tutoring plus there is a lot of grade deflation. Students who were used to getting straight As in HS, find themselves after 1 or 2 semester just struggling to "pass" the class with a 70. Therefore, in addition to having great ECs, I highly recommend you shore up your academic narrative if that is your top school.

CS is clearly one of most if not most popular majors at top American colleges, the competition is fierce so I highly recommend that you add other colleges and other majors to your college list so you have somewhere good to land.

Good luck.

Hi, thank you for asking your question! There are many factors besides grades and extracurriculars that go into the review process for admissions -- so to start off, I don't want to discount things like letter of recommendations, demographics, honors and awards and your essays. These are also very essential to making your application as impressive as possible. To find about more about this, check out our recorded livestream Ultimate Guide to Elite Admissions.

When applying to selective schools, at CollegeVine, we recommend having at least a 3.75 GPA and 1450 on the SAT to have a chance at admissions. That being said, as you mentioned, the higher those scores the better to show your academic strengths. Additionally, you want to make sure the course load is centered on STEM and the performance is high in this field because that is what you are applying into.

In terms of extracurriculars, a few things will make an activity stand out: 1) The uniqueness of the activity (how rare is it for other hs students to do the same thing you are doing); 2) The level of accomplishments; 3) The alignment with your field of interest; and 4) The time commitment to the activity (hrs/wk, wks/yr). In your case, I would say that the activity itself is amazing and shows a genuine passion, but may not be aligned with the major you are applying for, so it will seem less critical in the eyes of admissions officers for a computer science program. For more information, check out this blog post on what makes an extracurricular impressive.