Although I really like Vanderbilt, I don’t think I want to ED there (or anywhere really, i want to keep my options open). Thank you for the heads up about them being more stats based!
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Ok, keep it in mind for RD in that case.
Tufts might be another one to consider if you want to do more English coursework with an engineering degree… I believe they still have a 5 year program for students who want both sn engineering and liberal arts degree. But that also means another year of tuition. If that appeals to you, you might want to look at Masters degrees and see what would be required to use the 5th year for that.
As for your chances - it’s definitely worth your while to apply. But you’ll want to have some more match and safety schools as well - you could just as easily strike out at all of them as have options next spring. They kids I have known who were accepted to MIT recently were actually rather exceptional (as opposed to good, all round excellent students.)
Thanks for the Tufts suggestion! And i definitely have safeties and matches.
For MIT, what do u mean the students were exceptional? Like spiky in one area?
The kids I knew who were accepted by MIT all had some kind of exceptional accomplishment. Not simply good students with high stats. Iow, sort of hard to duplicate. I can’t imagine that there are no "plain old excellent " students at MIT but the subset that I know are most definitely not that.
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We’re there any girls in those you know who were accepted by MIT. They are a different subset.
Yes, one. And she too is exceptional (but chose Stanford).
So, that one is a pretty small sample.
I agree that kids getting into MIT are as a rule exceptional kids. I also know that exceptional kids are also being rejected from MIT and similar schools all the time.
What we can say is that being a super high achieving female already puts an applicant in a special category when the pool is engineering school applicants. When only 22% of Engineering students nationally are female and when MIT is as close to 50:50 gender ratio as any engineering school gets, it suggests that they are going further down the list of female applicants than they are with male applicants. So, a female applicant doesn’t have to be quite the same level of exceptional accomplishments as those male applicants you’ve seen. Just a guess on my part.
What is can/will your parents pay each year?
Have you run the net price calculators on all of your schools? Do that to see if they would be affordable. Your safeties also have to be affordable (and sometimes that is really hard to find at your family income level). Note the NPCs may not be accurate if your parents are divorced, own their own business, or own real estate beyond a primary home.
I am not sold on applying early to MIT, I don’t know that you will be competitive enough as your ECs are relatively light.
Your list is also very long right now, and I encourage you to refine it…right now I count 14 reaches and that is too many to be able to do a good job on all of the supplemental essays.
If you are NMF, you would have a full ride at U Alabama, assuming they don’t change the program for 2021/22. Is that school on your list?
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I’ve seen excellent girls not get in! Just commenting on successful applicants.
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I’ve seen the same, but not just at MIT.
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This is the underpinning of an actual discrimination lawsuit, which has been taken against MIT, Cornell, Harvard and a few others. It makes exactly your argument: because fewer women apply, and the schools are keeping the gender balance neutral, de facto it means that less qualified women are getting places over more qualified men.
In real life there is no actual evidence that the women who are getting into MIT or Cornell or whereever are actually less qualified or less ‘excellent’ than the men who are getting in. All any of us have are the individual cases we see, and as others here on CC have pointed out, "the plural of anecdote is not data’.
And I for one am tired of the ‘oh it’s an advantage to be a woman in STEM / applying to MIT / etc.’ as if all of the other obstacles - large and obvious / small and subtle- involved in getting to the point of application (nevermind admiission) don’t exist. K-12 is still effectively a weed-out class for women in STEM (yes, lots of progress is being made- but there is still a seriously long way to go- just b/c you see a lot of headlines and hashtags doesn’t mean it’s all better now), so it stands to reason that the ones who make it through are likely to be stronger than average candidates.
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Totally agree. If 5 girls are A1 and 10 boys are A1 and A1 is the best, and I admit 6, 3 of each, why would you assume that the A1 ones who were not admitted were weak? And if anyone of them had to overcome obstacles to become A1, good for them! Nobody is scraping the bottom of the barrel to find girls in engineering programs. And if they were, I’d tell the OP she had a 100% chance of getting into MIT because she looks like a great candidate. But I’m not comfortable saying that…
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I have run the net price calculators on all of the schools (my original list was much longer and it was after running those calcs that I got to this list). But yeah I do agree it’s a lot of reaches, and I’m most likely dropping some of them by the time applications start rolling around.
For applying to MIT, would it make a difference if I applied RD? According to them, the two are the same except for the results date so I wanted to apply early to get my decision early.
I’m planning on applying to either USF or UCF (I emailed both of them regarding benacquisto and they said even though the bill passed, they’re planning to still give a scholarship similar to before). Although U of Alabama gives an amazing offer for NMFs, I don’t really like the location and the school itself just isn’t for me.
In isolation, applying to a college (any college) EA is better because you could know a result earlier, which could alter your application strategy afterward. For example, any EA admission that is affordable becomes a safety, so you may be able to drop any applications to colleges that you like less than the colleges you have affordable EA admissions to.
Where it may get complicated is if any of the EA colleges have restrictions against applying EA to other colleges, so that you may have various sets of possible EA applications among the college where EA is possible. MIT is not restrictive in this sense, but HYPS are, so applying EA to any of HYPS excludes applying EA to the others among HYPS as well as MIT and other private schools. You may apply EA to MIT and other non-restrictive EA schools, but cannot apply EA to any of HYPS if you do so.
For colleges with rolling admissions, it is generally better to apply early, since you are likely to know the result early. At some colleges, the college or its popular majors gets more selective later during the admission season as it gets filled up.
Thank you for all the information. I don’t plan to apply to colleges SCEA, so that shouldn’t be a problem. I was just asking about you saying “I am not sold on applying early to MIT, I don’t know that you will be competitive enough as your ECs are relatively light.”
In the absence of any restrictive EA considerations, that might be a reason not to spend time and money applying to MIT at all, not a reason to apply RD instead of EA.
Harvey Mudd is a LAC so you have to take about as many humanities as STEM classes. Might be a way to get a degree in CS or Engineering but still take a good number of English classes. Both Mudd and CalTech have a core curriculum for the first three semesters where everyone takes similar classes…a good chance to find out if you are more CS or engineer…also Mudd has 52% females, so a better shot for someone like you whose ECs (esp leadership) aren’t as strong. Both CalTech and Mudd value collaboration, so if that’s your personality you’d have a better chance.
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Yes, I agree about Harvey Mudd, which is why I posted the caveats I did in my follow up to that recommendation. Good point about the gender ratio at Mudd. Also agree with you about Cal Tech. I didn’t recommend it because she said that she doesn’t want a school that small.
Harvey Mudd is a liberal arts college of science engineering and math, meaning it takes a liberal arts approach to STEM. So, the core curriculum that all students take in their first 1.5 years, has courses in bio, chem, physics, math, computer science, a course in writing, and a course in critical inquiry from the humanities dept to provide a broad introduction to science and technology. After the core curriculum, the student decides on a major and will take most of their remaining classes in that major. Harvey Mudd does want its students to have an awareness of the world outside of stem, and so has Humanities/social sciences requirements to the tune of about 25%. Most engineering schools have some humanities requirements because it is required for ABET accreditation. Mudd has requirements regarding breadth and depth of the humanities courses and each student has a humanities advisor in addition to their major advisor because Mudd wants the student to have a cohesive plan to their humanities portion of their studies. This is to support the HMC mission: to educate engineers, scientists, and mathematicians well versed in all of these areas and in the humanities and the social sciences so that they may assume leadership in their fields with a clear understanding of the impact of their work on society."
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