<p>I am a junior and I'm starting to prepare my college list right now. I have a 2350 SAT, 800s on Math II and Chemistry, 97 UW GPA, about 9 APs, and multiple high-up leadership positions, so I'm looking at the upper-echelon of schools. Here's my list so far:</p>
<p>Reach-
MIT
Stanford
Princeton
Caltech
UC Berkeley</p>
<p>Match (will be cut down to around 5)-
Cornell
Wash U
Northwestern
Rice
Vanderbilt
USC
Virginia
Michigan
UCLA</p>
<p>Safety-
Georgia Tech
Case Western
Rochester</p>
<p>Obviously it will be very hard to get into my top schools, so I don't want to be completely disappointed if I have to go to a safety. However, I am a bit unsatisfied with the list of safeties I have right now, so can you please offer a few suggestions? (my intended major is chemical engineering)</p>
<p>A few things that I would like:
Medium sized campus and student body
Relatively closed off and suburban, but still close to a city
Warm weather
Academic and intellectual environment (i.e., not a party school)</p>
<p>Money isn't a huge deal, but it wouldn't hurt to get some merit aid.</p>
<p>A safety has to be some place absolutely affordable (you haven’t told us anything helpful about your family’s ability to pay), some place you’d go if the bottom fell out, some place you’ve visited, some place that has your major, and some place you will most likely get into. It cannot require “student interest” unless you’re willing to demonstrate that aggressively. UMD, Bucknell, RIT, Lehigh, UDelaware, RPI, Pitt, Colorado School of Mines are some. I have no pony in this race.</p>
<p>I doubt that my family would qualify for any significant need-based aid, but they have said that they would probably be willing to pay around 40 to 50 thousand per year. Of course, I hope I will not need to go that high for my safety.</p>
<p>Here’s a breakdown of how I feel about my current safeties:
Georgia Tech- seems mostly nice in terms of location, but I’m a bit concerned about the atmosphere with STEM majors being a majority and the high male-female ratio
Case Western- not too many negatives, but perhaps a bit too close to the city
Rochester- very cold, lots of snow; seems like I would be paying a lot for an experience that I could get elsewhere</p>
<p>$40,000 to $50,000 per year will not be enough for many private schools unless you get enough scholarships (which need to be assured for stats, not competitive, if you want to use them for safeties). Some of the more expensive public schools’ out-of-state prices are over $50,000 per year, although you may be able to cover the overage with federal direct loan and/or work earnings.</p>
<p>Both CWRU and Rochester consider “level of applicant’s interest”, so you need to aggressively play the “interest” game for them. Since you do not seem like you are that interested in them, you may want to not consider them as safeties.</p>
<p>S1 was in your shoes a year ago. Same major plan, similar scores and such. Except we don’t have unlimited funds.</p>
<p>Georgia Tech is too low on your list. They are a top 10 school for ChemE.
Washington U. in St. Louis does not really offer ChemE
UT Austin is a top 10 School that is not on your list
Illinois is a better school for ChemE than Michigan (not that Michigan is bad)
Princeton is a great school, but not a top Engineering school. There are about 20 better choices before it is even a contest.
A major school not on your list is Carnegie Mellon. </p>
<p>When you say upper echelon, make sure you are looking specifically at what schools are upper in your field. Just because a school as a low acceptance rate does not mean it is upper in your case. Some of the best engineering schools are flagship state schools. It is not so important what the average person thinks of the school, it is more important what the reputation is in the industry. You may want to even consider some that are highly rated but not widely thought of as such: UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, Penn State, Maryland. I would drop Rice, Vandy, UVa, and Wash U from your list. Good schools, all, but not as strong in ChemE as in other fields.</p>
<p>University of Minnesota-TC. Well within your price range and a Chem E department that is every bit as good as those found at your reach schools. Really, if you can stand the weather, there’s no reason to not apply.
University of Texas-Austin. In case Minnesota is too cold for you.</p>
<p>Your GPA and SAT scores flat-out guarantee admission and merit-based aid at U of Alabama and a number of other places listed in the thread on Automatic Full-Tuition Scholarships in the Financial Aid Forum. Pop over to that forum, and read through that thread. Alabama could be your rock-bottom safety. The application next fall will take a whole five minutes of your time. </p>
Not on everyone’s book, I guess. A lot of students would even consider Princeton engineering superior to all but only 4 schools, and would even choose it over schools like Berkeley and Caltech engineering.</p>
<p>“Illinois is a better school for ChemE than Michigan (not that Michigan is bad)”</p>
<p>I don’t think that is accurate Torveaux. According to the latest rankings of undergraduate ChemE programs, Michigan was #11 and UIUC was #12. Also, given Michigan’s proximity to the largest Chemical company in the US (second largest in the World), Michigan ChemE grads definitely have great opportunities when they graduate.</p>
<p>“Princeton is a great school, but not a top Engineering school. There are about 20 better choices before it is even a contest.”</p>
<p>Again, I am not sure where you got your facts from. According to the latest rankings, Princeton’s Enginee.ring program was ranked #12 in the nation at the undergraduate level. Princeton is not as large or as research-intensive as some other top Engineering programs, but it is considered one of the very best. As RML points out, many (if not most) would gladly choose Princeton Engineering over CMU, Cornell, GT, Michigan, Northwestern, UIUC etc…</p>
<p>Georgia Tech does not appeal to many men. The 7:3 male to female ratio puts a lot of male applicants off.</p>
<p>I definitely agree about adding Minnesota and Texas though. </p>
<p>Off hand, I do not have the stats specifically for Berkeley’s engineering programs. Admit rates are not broken out program by program in the Common Data Set files. So it is possible that Berkeley’s stats for engineering admits are significantly higher than the overall averages. But then, the same may well be true for Rice, WashU, Northwestern, or Cornell. If you have those numbers, please share.</p>
<p>According to stateuniversity.com, here is how the overall 75th percentile SAT M+CR scores line up:
1550 Stanford (6.6% admission rate*)
1540 WashU (17.9%)
1530 Northwestern (15.3%)
1530 Rice (16.7%)
1500 Cornell (16.6%)
1490 Berkeley (18%)</p>
<p>You may be able to find separate engineering admit rates for some of these schools. However, at many schools, all applications for the entire college go into the same pipe. Separate stats may not be available.</p>
<p>tk, in the case of Cal, you must factor in the fact that Chemical Engineering is part of the College of Chemistry, which is more selective than most of Cal’s other programs…and that OOS applicants face significantly steeper odds…assuming the OP is indeed an OOS applicant.</p>
<p>Your matches are more like reaches if you are a white male. And your reaches are more like ‘super’ reaches. My son has the same sat scores and goes to a very competitive school, had a research internship with a college professor and was a Siemens Regional Finalist. His college councilor still thought Cornell, Michigan (oos) and Northwestern were reaches. Northwestern was a reach because they fill a high percentage with ED. You need some lower matches like John Hopkins. You should apply EA to Case Western and follow up with more safeties RD if you need them (like Stony Brook which has no additional essay and is rolling admissions). You also need to shorten your list because the supplements will kill you! The idea of a ‘Common’ app is a fallacy, the supplement are just as much work as the common app. Princeton alone had 2 long essays, 1 short and 8 additional questions. Good luck! </p>
<p>Now consider the following:
<a href=“SAT Scores for Admission to Top Engineering Schools”>http://collegeapps.about.com/od/sat/a/top-engineering-sat-scores.htm</a>
So for Cornell engineering applicants only, the 75th percentile SAT CR+M is 1550. That’s the same as Stanford’s overall number. (Unfortunately,the same page does not show the admit rate break-outs for engineering and other schools … but I think it is reasonable to assume that the Cornell engineering admit rate is lower than the overall rate, which reflects agriculture and hotel school as well as A&S and engineering admissions).</p>
<p>The point I was making above was not to start a p*ssing match between Berkeley and Cornell/WashU/Rice/NU.
The point was to caution the OP that he is underestimating the selectivity of some of these schools. Berkeley, I think it’s safe to say, is the least selective of his “reach” schools. Since at least 4 of his “match” schools are at least as selective as Berkeley is, overall, I’d put them too in the “reach” bucket. To argue that Berkeley/engineering also is even more selective than he thinks it is is besides the point. In fact, it only reinforces my call for caution.</p>
<p>Thank you for your post, TK. I wasn’t trying to question your intention, or that I was thinking that you’re trying to incite Berkeley supporters on this message board. I was thinking that you may have known some stats of Berkeley eng’g that I haven’t known yet. I’ve been trying to search for a separate stats of the different colleges of Berkeley, because as they say, each college at Berkeley has its own admissions criteria, and therefore, would have different stats. </p>