r/amherstcollege • u/thinkingvelvet • 25d ago
please chanceme ed 🙏
Amherst is my absolute dream, mainly because of the amazing PhD pipeline. I'm a current junior in high school. Please give me a realistic evaluation of my odds of acceptance. Don't be afraid to hurt my feelings.
I want to be a double major in English and French.
White, female, middle-income
UW gpa: 4.0
Weighted gpa: 4.5
ACT: 34
7 AP's by senior year (my school only allows them starting junior year):
\- AP Lang
\- APUSH
\- APES
\- AP Pre-Calc
\-AP Macro
\- AP Lit
\- AP Calc BC
120 volunteer hours with various organizations
\\\*\\\*Extracurriculars\\\*\\\*
1: Journalism program at school; youngest to be published in school's magazine (x2); multiple awards
2: Ethics Bowl
3: Superintendant's Student Advisory Board
4: Hostess at local restaurant (3 years by graduation)
5: Substack Blog (publish weekly)
6: Girls Lead Program 2025
7: Volunteering with local library (3 months so far)
8: TurnUp Youth Activism intern (2 months)
9: Orchestra; all-district cello
10: JV Golf team captain (2 years but I quit this year)
\\\* also currently creating a local litmag & literary organization where i host workshops and reading nights (we'll see if it succeeds)
\\\*\\\*Honors\\\*\\\*
1: Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Gold Key (poetry)
2: Second place; copy-editing at state for journalism
3: World language department academic excellence award in French
4: 1st place at journalism regionals (copy-editing)
5: 3rd place at journalism sectionals (copy-editing)
\\\* A few things to note: I am actively submitting to writing competitions and I joined yearbook this year to replace golf.
Thank you for taking the time to read this!
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u/Emotional-Initial-37 24d ago
My daughter is a senior currently. Try this exercise.
Go to chat gpt. Put in all of your information and ask to rank your statistical chances at acceptance to the US news top 100 list.
Amherst will be 6-8% roughly with chances significantly increasing if you do early decision (there are youtube videos that discuss this for the mini Ivies). Your stats would stack up very well against their admissions but with such a small class size, number of applications and other things in application to consider, it is still a tough entry. Go do a tour. Its a lovely little campus. Good luck.
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u/Mediocre-Jury9022 24d ago
I know someone who worked in admissions at AC. The early decision bump is a mirage. There is a much higher admissions rate for E.D. b/c almost all recruited athletes are required to apply E.D. - if you are not a recruited athlete, there is no real bump to applying E.D.
Your application qualifications are absolutely typical of students who are accepted to A.C. But - A.C. gets more students with those exact types of qualifications than it can admit. Thus, anytime you apply for admission to any of these colleges with such low admission rates, there is an element of a lottery to it. If you are rejected, it was not b/c your stats weren't good enough. It was b/c you were unlucky. Similarly, if you are accepted, it was not b/c you were "better" than the rejected applicants, it was b/c you were lucky. Your stats will get you into the conversation, but the final decision will not be driven by your excellent stats, but rather the soft factors of whether something you say happens to catch the interest of whichever admissions officer is your first reader - and different officers might be "caught" by different things. Absolutely impossible to predict.
For what it's worth, A.C. is not the national leader in PhD pipeline for Literature/Language grad schools. It is a GREAT SCHOOL. But if your goal is a PhD in English or Foreign Languages, it is not necessarily the best school in all of the US.
College Transitions has helpfully put together a table based on the NSF data on origin school of US PhD's. Click on the field of interest, and it will give you (on the left) the top 50 schools by raw numbers (these are big schools, often public flagships) and (on the right) the top 50 schools as a percentage of their student body (these are the small schools, where the total number of students getting a PhD is smaller, but as a percentage of the total student body, it is much higher). I have pasted the top 15 for English below. As a percentage of its student body getting PhD's in English, you'll note that Amherst College ranks 9th, and that in the top 15, only Swarthmore, Williams, and Amherst are crazy difficult to be accepted to. (For Foreign Languages, Amherst ranks 46). (The numbers in the third and seventh columns are the raw number of students getting PhD's in the field in a recent time period - not sure if it is five or ten years).
Good luck!!
The full website is: Top Feeders to Ph.D. Programs
1 University of California-Berkeley 85 1 Bryn Mawr College 20 2 Columbia University in the City of New York 55 2 Hampshire College 7 3 Brigham Young University-Provo 54 3 Carleton College 28 4 Harvard University 52 4 University of Dallas 19 5 The University of Texas at Austin 51 5 Swarthmore College 21 5 Yale University 51 6 Kenyon College 24 7 University of Chicago 50 7 Reed College 19 8 New York University 48 8 Sarah Lawrence College 17 9 University of California-Los Angeles 45 9 Amherst College 20 10 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 39 10 Oberlin College 31 11 University of Georgia 38 11 Haverford College 14 11 University of Wisconsin-Madison 38 12 Vassar College 23 13 Cornell University 37 13 Williams College 19 13 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 37 14 St. John's College 4 15 University of Pennsylvania 36 15 Beloit College 8 1
u/thinkingvelvet 24d ago
Thank you so much! I agree, admissions are always a gamble. I just wanted to see if I had a good enough baseline to be considered.
Also, I know it isn't the best PhD feeder, but it is pretty excellent. I don't think I could get into schools like Harvad and Columbia either lol so Amherst is good enough for me.
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u/biznisss 24d ago
i think you have a decent shot! obviously no guarantees with any school like amherst. i was admitted off the waitlist with duller credentials than yours. i do feel the admissions officers paid particular attention to my essay as a differentiator. put some thought into what appeals to you about how you think the environment for learning and development at amherst fosters good PhD candidates and communicating that in your application essays.
probably wouldn't talk about wanting to get into a great PhD program directly, but include a discussion of what it takes to produce good research and find a good fit with the subject areas you want to focus on.