Stats

My GPA was 99.6 out of 100. In 9th and 10th grade, I took 5 IGCSE classes at school as my school followed the Cambridge Program. In the last two years, I took three AP courses outside of the school curriculum which are AP Calculus BC, AP Biology and AP Chemistry. I got 5 from all of them. Additionally, I took the IELTS (one time) and SAT (four times). My IELTS score is 8.0 and my SAT superscore is 1520. I submitted all of my scores to every college I applied.

Extracurricular activities

I would categorize my extracurricular activities into three parts which are community service, STEM and research, and environmental science. My first activity was a nonprofit organization that I started in 10th grade with my friends named Vertie. We started an initiative to raise awareness of current environmental problems and suggest sustainable solutions to students. Within two years, we reached more than 300 students and are still in the process. Our project has received many awards, funds and recognition in the national media. Then I was a part of a nonprofit organization called YGA (Young Group Academy) in Turkey. I got into their extremely competitive program which out of 50,000 applicants, only 25 were accepted. There, we learned about social entrepreneurship and did various volunteer projects. During those projects, I was able to teach children about STEM in village schools and conduct scientific experiments. I also worked with students who were visually-impaired, orphaned, and affected by the earthquake. We visited different cities and reached out to earthquake victims, especially to children to immerse them in STEM. Another activity that I listed was my project manager role in a high school initiative. We initiated many voluntary work for high schoolers but the most impactful was gathering different necessities and sending them to earthquake zones in 2023 after serial earthquakes happened in Turkey.

Talking about activities in the STEM and research fields, I was accepted into the Lumiere Research Program and wrote a 25-page research paper on vitiligo pathogenesis with the help of my mentor from University of Cambridge. Another thing I did was a lab internship in a genetic diagnosis center at a local university. In 12th grade, I also started a physics research with my teacher on image processing techniques. Initially, I did not list it on my CommonApp. However, I sent updates to schools about this research in February. I was also a writer for a college bioengineering magazine, publishing articles about new accomplishments in the bioengineering area.

For sustainability and environmental science, in addition to Vertie, I also mentioned my passion for climate activism, and how I took research positions in two different organizations. Additionally, I participated in a virtual exchange program named AFS Global STEM Accelerators, organized by AFS and UPenn. We were learning about intercultural communication and sustainable development goals. At the end, other participants and I developed our own capstone projects in which my project was on sustainability.

The last thing that was not really fitting into my application was that I spent a lot of time interning at the Nobel Company. There, I was an intern and later became a mentor and a part of the MC team.

Essays

My personal statement was about my mom having health struggles in the past and how this led me to cooking. While she was having these struggles, I had to cook for the family. Initially, I was not good at cooking, but over a year, it developed significantly and helped me express my feelings and ideas. Cooking has become a way for me to communicate with people.

In my supplemental essays, I mostly talked about my interest in biology and experience of having an autoimmune disorder. In high school, I had a teacher who also had an autoimmune disorder and in her class, I wanted to learn more about my disorder. That was how I started to research immunology and other topics in molecular biology. Another experience I was writing about was the initiative that I started with my friends and how I would transfer my knowledge and skills from it to the college life and campus.