What public colleges in CA or private ones anywhere should I consider applying to as my safety schools?

Question

I am a high school junior in a very competitive school in California. I am American-Asian (Indian) and moved to California at the age of 8. I'm looking for wither public universities in California or private universities anywhere in the U.S.

Academics:

My gpa is about 4.0 Weighted.

I only took the SAT's once and received a 2260:

Math- 800

CR- 670

Writing- 790

Total- 2260

I have taken and am taking many honors/AP courses.

EC's:

Co-founded and was VP of the chess club in freshman year.

3 years of Spanish club

Planning to do Academic Decathlon next year.

Starting a Future Business Leaders of America chapter at my school.

Played two years of tennis for the school team.

I have played chess competitively since sixth grade and have received many awards. Some of them include:

1st place K-8 in NorCal 8th grade

Tied for 11th in World Open in 2006 and for 14th in 2007 in Philadelphia, PA.

I am currently ranked among the top 50 players for my age in the country.

Community Service:

Last summer, I when I visited India, I volunteered in an orphanage for a week, teaching children and playing with them. I also donated food, clothes, and toys, as well as as $200 of my chess earnings from tournaments.I lived with the kids there for a week and helped teach the children, play with them, and spend quality time with them. It was one of the most enriching experiences of my life (about 120 hours).

Helped teach kids in summer school in 2005. (80 hours)

Have taught chess.

Active volunteer in my local community for the city (40-50 hours).

I am leaning towards the business side, mostly finance and economics.

I also plan to write my essays about my volunteer experience at the orphanage, my chess experiences and what they have taught me, or my experiences immigrating to the US.

What schools in should I consider as my safety schools? Please tell some good schools that I would definitely get into, either public schools in California or private universities anywhere.

Thank you very much...

Answer 1

well, it seems like you can consider the majority of UC schools as your safety. Although UCs has been getting a lot more competitive in the past few years so even with UCSD, you never know if you'd get in with such good grades and scores etc. But, for the UCs especially, they don't really care much about weighted GPA and for private schools, they care more about ranking.

Depending on your unweighted GPA, you can probably apply to UC Irvine and UC Davis as safe schools. Any of the state universities are definitely going to be safety schools. If you have a good essay, private schools like USD and USC are well within your range but I wouldn't consider them safe schools. For outside of CA, NYU is in the safe school range and it has an excellent business program.

If you have a high unweighted GPA (above 3.5) you'll most likely get into UC Berkeley, UCLA and UCSD too.

EDIT: oh, just some advice, don't write about your immigration experience unless you have a really unique one. (ex. you are a refugee from a war torn country etc.) There are so many immigrants and children of immigrants who apply to UC schools and top private schools, and many of those will write about the immigration experience. Writing about your orphanage experience will probably make you stand out the most.