Chance a Homeschooled Student

Chance Me / Match Me!
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Hi-ho, I thought a chances thread might be fun a) because I’d like to get a sense for how my credentials stack up and b) I think that, maybe, it might be interesting for everyone to try and chance a non-traditional student (me).

Intended Major: English/Philosophy (If I decide to be /really/ pretentious and not sleep, I might do a double major.)

SAT I : 2280 800 CR, 730 M, 750 WR

SAT II 800 US History, 780 US Literature

UW GPA : 4.0! (Butt I’m home schooled. So it isn’t terribly indicative of much)

Rank: 1/1 (Again, home schooled)

Major Awards: Errr. None – not even National Merit because I didn’t take the PSAT. (It seemed kind of pointless.)

EC’s

Intern for Obama Campaign in 2012 (Not for a national office or anything – just the podunk district office that got set up in my town.)

Treasurer for Psi Beta (It’s an honors society in Psych)

Team Captain for Academic-y Quiz Bowl thing that is kind of like a Quiz Bowl but not Quiz Bowl thing. (At least, team captain /this/ year.)

Anddd that’s the sum total of my EC’s; I don’t go to a school so it’s a lot harder to find stuff to pad my application. with.

School Type: Home school
Ethnicity: White (In particular, Appalachian Redneck Guido/Mick hybrid.)
State: Pennsylvania. (There’s a saying that goes something like, "Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh on one end, Philadelphia on the other and Alabama in between. I live in the Alabama-y portion, though not actually in the center of the state; I’m more to the north where there’s mountains and skiing and actual, genuine, moonshine and bootleggers.)

Notes: Oh, And I’m pretty poor. Not first-gen or URM – my mother, somehow, managed to graduate from college – but around 30k~ in income for my family – which means that anywhere I go I need something /really/ close to a full ride; my family can maybe only handle somewhere between 5-10k in total cost for school a year.

Schools:
(This is a silly, overlong list that hasn’t been edited down yet; I expect to do some culling based on what I think my chances are of getting into different places + how much I would actually want to attend the school. Oh, and aid, because I really can’t afford /not/ to be a money grubber.)

Reed College
Amherst College
Bowdoin College
Brown University
Dartmouth College
Johns Hopkins University – because I drool over the thought of being a student at the Writing Seminars.
Oberlin College
Pomona College
Vassar College
Wesleyan University
Swarthmore College
Williams College
University of Chicago
Georgetown University
University of Pennsylvania

P.S I’m probably short on safety schools – recommend some? Strong financial aid is a must, otherwise, it’s not really a doable safety for me.

All right CC, give me your worst: chance me and crush, if at all possible, my dreams.

EDIT: I had somehow forgotten this when I posted the thread: I’ve some classes at a local community college (four total in my Junior year + three more planned for fall semester next fall) and my GPA in those courses has been a 4.0.

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Homeschool parent of a 2015 grad here; I don’t do ‘chancing’ though your stats and overall profile look great. A couple of good safety/low match schools with extremely generous need-based aid would be Kenyon and Franklin & Marshall.

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@hs2015mom I had been considering Kenyon, but, I was kind of scared off by a) reports that they yield protect – deny otherwise qualified students because they don’t think they’ll enroll at Kenyon – and because they seem to require/strongly recommend a campus interview for home schooled students, which I can’t really do. My family’s car is old, not terribly well serviced and we can’t afford the expense of gas, staying somewhere, et cetera.

Will check Franklin & Marshall though; it’s actually pretty close to where I live and I haven’t heard of them before.

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Agreed on the yield protection and the need for homeschooled students to visit, but maybe there’s a way to do so with Kenyon funding it; it can’t hurt to try. Many of the expense-paid diversity fly-ins at LACs are open to low-income students as well as URMs and first-gen kids. Kenyon’s is described specifically as multi-cultural, but I wouldn’t rule it out: http://www.kenyon.edu/visit-kenyon/admissions-events/. The combination of your stats and being male would make you a very attractive candidate for Kenyon; it’s more skewed female than the tippy-top LACs on your list. It’s worth a letter to them describing your background and attaching a resume or profile like you’ve got above, and seeing what they say.

Amherst, Bowdoin, Williams and Swat all have diversity fly-ins that you should look into. And I know you’re looking to cut down your list rather than expand it, but Carleton, another great school with generous need-based aid, has a Taste of Carleton diversity weekend. My daughter is a URM (for LACs, anyway) and attended last year, and said there were low-income-but-not-first-gen kids in the group.

I think you’re probably eligible for application fee waivers due to your family income, which would help you to apply widely without breaking the bank.

And F&M came to my attention because a couple of years ago they eliminated merit aid in order to put everything into need-based aid, and offered extremely generous need-based aid to my daughter, better than that from a couple of other meets-full-need schools, a tippy-top LAC and a ‘lower Ivy’.