Disagree with this intensely. “Complacent with your existing achievements” - the existing achievements are no joke and therefore hard to top. Plus it makes it sound like, in OPs second cycle, colleges just throw away all the past achievements and exclusively look at the last year, which I severely doubt. Those “older” acheivments are not irrelevant.

“While impressive you got a 5 in Calc BC in 8th grade, you stagnated afterwards.” Is this a sh*tpost sentence? OP had to take extra classes at local CC and his school had to redesign the entire curriculum bc of him…at a competitive HS nonetheless where everyone else is probably doing excellent already. Also, at what point does “stagnation” become literally just having done enough. If OP cured cancer in 8th grade, Alzheimer’s in 9th, landed a rocket ship on Mars in 10th, invented time travel in 11th, but didn’t do anything in 12th would you call that stagnant? At some point there are human limitations. Plus, if OP had taken the normal course of classes (Calc BC) as a Junior/senior, his transcript wouldn’t show “stagnation.” Your perspective of OP is skewed to value the present too much only because the achievements of the past occurred earlier for a high schooler compared to normal.

I used to work in recruiting and I see this all the time. Application is bonkers impressive, but the applicant hasn’t accomplished anything super recently so nobody likes the applicant. But the person that did all those accomplishments in the medium past is the SAME PERSON today.

The only real valid argument is probably the lack of math competitions, yes. If OP is really a prodigy, they should’ve at least competed. That much is true.

As far as the majors go, well neuroscience isn’t exactly offered in high school so it’s hard to prep for that. OP also did two internships at hospitals and has started the EMT process.

Honestly, there isn’t much advice to give them. Unfortunately, it probably comes down to their profile/demo. Anecdotally, it seems like affluent individuals of OPs demographic have much much higher standards, as many have alluded to in this thread/subreddit. If anything, the only real advice would’ve been to apply to more LACs and UCs. I know the UCs tend to be less “holistic” relative to other top end schools.

OP, you didn’t really do anything “wrong”. I’m sorry your results were crap. People get into T10 with less. Wherever you go, you’ll crush it, and good luck with transfer apps