Best chances for math/science female

College Search & Selection
1

<p>D (Jr.) may be changing her focus in her school search from small LAC's to at least considering mid-size uni's. Generous FA and/or merit aid will be a substantial consideration. </p>

<p>In brief D is a 4.0 UW,4.67 W, #1 -140, 32 ACT first setting with a 36 Math, 4yr varsity BBall (could play D3 ,if she wants, at some schools),4 year marching band leader,state qualifier solo and ensemble, regional math medalist,good community service profile, strange hobbies.</p>

<p>I don't want to put any other strictures on any rec's you may have , but by way of example and limitation -Rice sounds perfect, except we are from Texas so she will not consider it.</p>

<p>Penn's SEAS, with the BAS degree in Biomedical science (not BME- as D doesn't want engineering as she is determined to be pre-med and fears engineering will drag the GPA down to reject level) looks very interesting to her and prompted long discussions which have culminated in this post. The Penn adcom we spoke with was upfront that D's gender would be a substantial hook in admissions to SEAS. I'm assuming there are other schools that might like to close the gender gap, also. </p>

<p>D would probably major or concentrate in biology or chemistry, and Penn's computational biology BAS also looked interesting to her at first glance, but we did not find much on the website about it. Any rec's or suggestions you have of schools or programs within schools that might appreciate what she has to offer would be appreciated.</p>

2

<p>Wash U in St. Louis, Emory, Vanderbilt, and Duke are all good schools to look at if you are considering Rice. Farther north are Northwestern, Tufts, University of Chicago.... I'll mention Wake Forest, but I am not too familiar with it. There is always Stanford.</p>

3

<p>Check out: Tufts, U of Rochester, Johns Hopkins, Brandeis, Case Western Reserve. I'll send you a few other recommendations privately.</p>

4

<p>"Cangel shakes her rattle even harder, the clouds are gathering, thunder murmurs" - Dart-mouth, Dart-mouth. Actually not the greatest math and science place. </p>

<p>Already been considered and not mid-size, but Davidson's new genomic program is highly interesting, and can be approached from a bio, chem, physics or informatics (comp sci) perspective. Not exactly straight math, but a fascinating intradisciplinary program for someone who is math oriented but wants bio and chem. Not to mention one of the finest pre-med orgs in the country.</p>

<p>She/you might want to haunt the pre-med board, with some questions about majors, fallback plans etc. Pre-med is so numbers driven, she is right to be concerned about GPA, although I think an engineer from a top 25 school would get a little slack - some of that diversity of major stuff. Check out this link, there is a chart way down the middle of this long page that gives some figures to keep in the back of her mind, and it refers to very competitive med schools.
<a href="http://www.amherst.edu/%7Esageorge/guide1.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.amherst.edu/~sageorge/guide1.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Look for the "What are my chances?" box.</p>

<p>I will give her the same advice (at least somewhat in the know) that I gave my daughter - if your goal is to be a practicing physician in your area, your best bet is flagship state uni of your state (honors college, probably, the downside is enhanced competition, but there may be important opportunities only available to the honors students - need to do homework) OR certain LACs, usually LACs in a city with a med school, but not necessarily directly affliated with the med school - Rhodes and B'ham-Southern are the 2 that I'm most familiar with, but I'm sure there are others in other cities that fit the profile. I'm generally less enthusiastic about the schools that are traditionally seen here as med school feeders, the competition is too stiff, both in class and for those precious extracurricular opportunities.</p>

<p>You know, though, that my girl rejected my advice, and went for a school while not the worst choice, is certainly not the straight path to an MD. I feel strongly she made the right decision for her, because she is interested in many things, and may end up in Foreign Service or as a lawyer or CIA analyst or an economist, or any one of a number of things unrelated to medicine. The hardest thing about planning a pre-med program is dealing with the reality that most kids who start it will never become MDs, and how to decide does this apply to me, am I willing to make the sacrifices - up to and including graduating with no employable skills, but still having not made the MD cut - it is tough balancing all those concerns, but I bet Mudgette is definitely up to the challenge. Good luck.</p>

5

<p>The Greene's Guide "Inside the Top Colleges" has the result of a survey about the academic culture inside the top colleges. It has always bothered me that 45.9% of students at Hopkins say that the behavior of classmates is cutthroat. Cutthroat behavior in a pre-med program would include sabotaging classmates' chemistry experiments. By comparsion, U of Chicago (20.5%), UPenn (20.4%), Cornell (20.1%), MIT (11.9%), Harvard (11.7%), Georgetown (6.5%), Columbia (6.5%), Northwestern (5.9%), Princeton (5.0%), Yale (4.7%), Duke (3.4%), Dartmouth (2.6%), Stanford (2.3%), and Brown (0.3%). The survey is several years old. It might show once again that you can't pick a college based solely on ranking. Just thought I would throw it out there.</p>

6

<p>MIT sounds like an option.
Females with great stats have a good chance there.</p>

7

<p>Another engineering option is Carnegie Mellon. However, my son wanted to have a double major in Biology and Math. At CMU's presentation, the admission officer asked everyone in the audience who wanted to major in engineering to raise their hands. About 80% of the hands went up and that killed CMU's chances with my son. Since your daughter is primarily interested in small LAC's, I'm not sure that the engineering schools mentioned above (Rochester, Case Western, MIT) will have the proper "personality" for what she is looking for.</p>

8

<p>Thanks , folks. I'm taking notes and will post more later. MIT? It would have never entered my mind that I would ever know anybody who could legitimately apply to MIT, much less that my D could be one. LOL. We'll look at their accepted students' stats, but I can't imagine......</p>

9

<p>Johns Hopkins (as Carolyn mentioned) and Brown.</p>

10

<p>D3709 (man, typing dufus did not feel comfortable to me at all. LOL.), can you elaborate on your statement about the more tech-y school's personalities maybe not appealing to D? We have only visited 2 true tech's and D didn't like either one, so maybe there is something to that.</p>

11

<p>One more -- Cornell. The kids I know who go there seem like your daughter's type. Energetic, enthusiastic, multifaceted.</p>

<p>(Plus I had to get over that 666 mark. The Devil's post. . .[scary music]:))</p>

12

<p>LOL. Momrath. I can hear the scary music.</p>

13

<p>U of Rochester is kind of LACish in feel, actually. I highly recommend it, and it gives merit aid, which you said is a consideration.</p>

14

<p>I can't remember, did you visit Chicago, did she like U of Chi or NW? My friend's mathish daughter turned down Yale for Duke because of fit reasons - Duke seems very score oriented, but she has time to do something about those if necessary, no merit aid there though.</p>

15

<p>cangel, I'm embarrassed to say that we did not see either chicago or NW on our Chicago trip. Lake Forest College , a nice little lac was her focus at that time.</p>

16

<p>I second Brown. I love the .3% cut throat rating... It jibes with my experiences. </p>

<p>I bet a girl in the sciences gets a bump in many places. In another thread someone posted stats indicating that 3x highter % girls are admitted to MIT than % of boys... Wow.</p>

<p>Extrapolating: if 7500 boys apply to MIT and 2500 girls, with about 500 of each sex admitted, then I suspect the applicants to science & math departments of many liberal arts schools are also lopsided. </p>

<p>Bottoms up curmudgeon!</p>

17

<p>If she develops interest in mid-size schools, I would definitely suggest Duke and Chicago, with public Uni Honors Colleges as safeties. The biomedical program at Penn sounds interesting, and may be difficult to duplicate in a less selective school.</p>

18

<p>curmudgeon,
You asked me to elaborate on my statement that the more tech-y school's personalities might not appealing to your D. </p>

<p>This is probably going to be hard to do without alienating the engineers in the forum, and so I expect a few hostile responses. :) Let me start by saying that I got a math degree a long time ago from Drexel U. which is in the same general category as Rochester or Case Western. Drexel is primarily an engineering school but also offers other degrees, particularly business degrees.</p>

<p>My simple answer is that your D is probably reacting to the geek factor at more "tech-y schools". As a "scientist type" instead of an "engineering type" and as someone who is interested in biology instead of physics and computer science, she might be turned off by the general atmosphere on engineering campuses. Engineers take the same curriculum in freshman year no matter what their specific major may be. It includes physics, calculus, chemisty and computer science. During freshman year, the engineering faculty tries hard to thin the herd by moving the less committed students into other majors. This makes freshman year into an intense experience. Your D is interested in a career in medicine or biological research, and the engineers are dreaming at night about calculus problems and building robots that shoot lasers out of their eyes. It is my personal opinion that this might be why she appears to be less interested in "tech-y" schools. This would seem to be particularly true if she is primarily interested in LAC's to start with. Of course, we are using the word "tech-y" to mean engineering instead of science. (I have no idea what the atmosphere for a biology major would be at MIT.)</p>

<p>Earlier I reacted to your mention of Rice by bringing up Duke, Washington U in St. Louis, Emory and Vanderbilt. These are mid-sized universities that are extremely strong in science, but have strong departments in liberal arts fields. WUSTL, Emory and Vanderbilt are in major cities. Duke and Vanderbilt have sport teams. Emory is very big on intramurals, but no D1 teams.</p>

19

<p>I agree with Dufus, DD, again toyed with the idea of MIT, partly because of the freshmen requirements, and the boost for girls, and the "true home of interesting geeks" factor but she just wanted a different, more typical experience. Your daughter needs to visit a "techie" school, even if it is a virtual visit. We walked around MIT during our mid-trip weekend which we spent in Boston, one look at the campus was the final straw. Not that it was bad, or ugly, anything, but it is urban (by her definition), and failed the first basic test.</p>

20

<p>Princeton...as well as Brown, would be my recs. </p>

<p>Both strong in science, slight edge to science females, and all-around great education with undergrad focus, not unlike LACs.</p>

<p>The combo of #1 rank and varsity sports has always been lucky for our HS seniors applying to Princeton.</p>