See earlier advice regarding my personal statement/essay.

If you are undecided about what major you'll want to pursue, you'll want to consider several factors in determining which school to attend. In my case, the school I chose was Penn, and for several reasons: (1) Penn had many more majors than other high-caliber schools that I looked into; (2) Penn's courses were frequently interdisciplinary, which meant that taking certain courses counted for many majors and would...

I am a white male, so ultimately I had a slight uphill battle, in that sense, when applying to Penn. However, I was also from a smaller public high school in southeast Virginia, and did not have many others from my geographical area with which to compete for a spot at Penn, and that likely helped me. With that said, I did come from an under-performing public high school, and getting into a great school with only 3 AP classes was hard at...