Chance/Match: NoVA Asian male senior [3.86 unweighted GPA/1550 SAT] most likely STEM major and music minor

Chance Me / Match Me!
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Posting this for S24. He doesn’t yet know what he wants to major in. He is a very good clarinetist, so his ECs are mostly music-related and he wants to continue at a high level in college but not major (maybe minor?) I am trying to help him add to/confirm/be realistic about his initial college list. We are super lucky in that there are no cost constraints.

Demographics

  • US citizen
  • Northern VA Resident
  • Highly ranked public HS
  • Asian male

Intended Major(s)

  • Undecided. Most likely math/science oriented, maybe engineering
  • Involvement in a top music ensemble, maybe a music minor

GPA, Rank, and Test Scores

  • 3.86 unweighted GPA. B+ in AP English 10, a few A-s in 11
  • No class rank
  • SAT: 1550, 790 Math / 760 English

Coursework

  • AP Scores: 4 in English, rest 5s
  • AP Scholar w/Distinction
    • World History (10)
    • English (11)
    • US History (11)
    • Calculus BC (11)
    • Physics 1 (11)
    • Comparative Govt (12)
    • English Lit (12)
    • Comp Sci A (12)
    • Physics C (12)
  • College courses
    • MV Calculus/Linear Algebra (12)
    • Harvard Summer School: Public Speaking, Essay Writing (summer before 12)

Awards

  • 2024 National Merit Scholarship Program Semi-Finalist
  • CollegeBoard AP Scholar Award with Distinction
  • National Honor Society
  • Science National Honor Society
  • Mu Alpha Theta Math Honor Society
  • Music:
    • Tri-M Music Honor Society
    • Finalist in multiple clarinet competitions
    • Invited guest clarinetist:
      • Local professional symphony
      • United States Air Force Concert Band Chamber Ensemble
    • NafME All-National Band - 2 years
    • All-State Band/Orchestra - 3 years
    • All-District Band - 3 years

Extracurriculars

  • American Youth Philharmonic Orchestras (premier orchestra program in DMV area) - 4 years
  • Boston University Tanglewood Institute for music (summer before 11)
  • Interlochen Arts Camp for music (summer before 10)
  • High school band, marching band, chamber, and jazz - 4 years
  • Chess Club, 2 years
  • Various tutoring and volunteer work - 4 years

Essays

  • Loves to study and play chess as of a few years ago, not highly ranked yet
  • Mixed race - Asian father, Indian mother
  • Independently motivated

LORs

  • School music teacher, knows him for 4 years (8/10)
  • Physics teacher, also chess club supervisor (9/10)
  • Math teacher (7/10)
  • School Counselor (large school, 5/10)

Cost Constraints / Budget

  • None. ROI is consideration, i.e. UVA/VA Tech for discounted tuition or merit scholarships for OOS publics

Schools

  • Preferences: Larger student body. Reasonably close to home (VA). Not the deep South. Not too cold.
  • Safeties: Penn State (EA), Pitt, Purdue
  • Matches: Lehigh, UVA (EA), VATech (EA), URochester
  • Reaches: Stanford (REA?), CMU (ED?), Harvard, Columbia, BU, UNC
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Congratulations to your son on his strong background that he’s built in high school.

Knowing more about your son’s preferences can help in offering suggestions.

How does your son feel about class sizes? Does he prefer smaller classes or does he prefer the anonymity of larger ones? How important is it to him to have a lot of hands-on classes? Does he want a full professor teaching him at all times, or is he okay with grad students leading recitation or discussion sections?

What is his preferred size of school?

How does he feel about urban/suburban/town/rural?

What distance is considered reasonably close to home? 2 hours drive? 6 hours? 10 hours? A nonstop flight?

How does your son feel about Greek life?

How important is enthusiasm for intercollegiate sports?

Most colleges that request 2 letters of recommendations from teachers want one from a STEM teacher and one from a humanities/social sciences teacher. So I would go with the physics teacher and then find a different teacher for the other rec.

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Congrats to your son. Sounds fantastic. For what it’s worth, many schools will recalc those A- to As.

I suspect he’ll do well in state and if ROI matters - and not Deep South. That’s your best bet. W&M wouldn’t work but there’s nothing wrong with the ABET programs at CNU and VCU. I imagine W&M would be too small anyway.

I see no need to apply to PSU or Pitt. ROI wise they just don’t make sense Bs $37k at almost assured Va Tech.

Purdue -a high target for engineering but safety for other STEM does make sense. But it’s not close.

Not sure any of your reaches make sense from an ROI POV and large school POV. BU is large but the ROI would be limited. And most your list is cold. And UNC not for general engineering but NC State would make sense

If the school reclasses the A- to A, then U of Arizona, strong in STEM and engineering - would be far less than Va Tech at $30k off. Even if not, you’d get $20k. ASU has a top Honors college and would be $15k off. Yes they’re not close but a 5 hr flight or longer drive, what’s the difference ?

You might sub out a Penn State for a Delaware or Ohio State for ROI purposes. Or for a bit smaller Miami of Ohio. These are cold so not sure how to take your comment. SUNY too - Binghamton seems popular. Buffalo too but colder. Stony Brook is well reputed but many say it’s a suit case school.

Because you threw out the south and cold I’m hesitant to go more mid west - so I won’t throw out the K state or KU or Iowa State or smaller Missouri Science and Tech - but they will have great ROI too. School of Mines in Colorado has great weather (yea a cold season). Costs have gone up but has merit. U of Denver is smaller like some you had on your list but most at your stats seem to get $30k merit. But again - a plane ride. But from DC will be lots of non stops.

So this is an ROI driven list. I truly believe, the student more than the school makes their destiny. Both my kids have demonstrated that with the one engineering grad from Bama turning down Purdue with merit and now on a first year program with Purdue engineers. He also did a second summer at his internship whereas his two Ga Tech roommates didn’t come back.

So I think your son has good odds in state but from an ROI POV, in case something goes wrong, I’d add better ROI schools out of state (or VCU/CNU which many won’t do. CNU too small anyway.

Some odds will depend on the major. If engineering is possible, better to start there and transfer out then vice versa in many cases.

Good luck.

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Have you looked at the University of Maryland? They have several strongly ranked engineering programs with new state-of-the-art facilities, plus a well regarded school of music. Plus it meets your “Larger student body. Reasonably close to home (VA)” criteria.

Maybe also Rutgers (as a safety)? Much closer than your current set of safeties*. They have a good engineering school plus the Mason Gross School of the Arts.

(* - both Purdue and UMD will be targets for engineering, not safeties)

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Congrats, your son should have no problems to get to a great school. Your only problem can be with too many students from his school and your area applying to the the same colleges and competing against each other. I know metro DMV is terribly competitive area with a lot of smart kids from top schools.
I think your safeties are good (I would probably not call Purdue safety). UVA is probably a reach, but he may get in. He should have no problems with Lehigh, VATech, or URochester. Reachers are always reaches.

BU has a tendency to not take top students (BU does not want to be a safety school). This is from my personal experience with DD (accepted to CMU, UMich and GaTech, but rejected at BU). This is also the experience of our friend (accepted to Yale, Brown, Hopkins and again rejected at BU)…
I guess you are full pay. Unless you have financial need, do not expect money from CMU or other school on your reach list (I am not sure about UNC). DD got 5k FA from CMU. We laughed and moved on.
Good luck!

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Your son sounds like he is doing very well. Congratulations!

I think that your son is competitive anywhere. With an intended STEM major, I would not worry about one B in English (although I also would not worry about it even for a non-STEM major). Being very strong in music is relatively common among STEM students.

I think that you have a good mix of universities to apply to. Given how strong UVA is, I am not convinced that it would be worth being full pay at BU, or that I would prefer UNC over UVA. However, this assumes that your son gets accepted to UVA (which I would hope he would be in-state, but I cannot be sure).

Since someone mentioned Rutgers, I will point out that the Rutgers graduates that I have known have made it look very good.

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If being reasonably close to home is a factor, how has Stanford made the list (and as a possible REA school)? Apart from biomedical engineering, UNC doesn’t offer engineering, so I’d remove that from the list of possibilities. I agree with others that BU is unlikely to have the ROI that other schools on his list will have. With respect to “not too cold” that raises big questions in my mind about U. of Rochester & CMU in particular, but also in relation to the Boston schools. So is upstate New York and Massachusetts definitely in the realm of possible in terms of his climate preferences?

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URochester is not too cold? Seriously?Then what is cold, Alaska :slight_smile:?
I just looked up coldest cities in the US out of curiosity.
#1 Minneapolis, #2 Anchorage (Alaska :slight_smile: ), #3 Madison (WI)…#6 Chicago… #8 Rochester.

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Thank you for responding! I will try to answer best I can.

How does your son feel about class sizes? Does he prefer smaller classes or does he prefer the anonymity of larger ones? How important is it to him to have a lot of hands-on classes? Does he want a full professor teaching him at all times, or is he okay with grad students leading recitation or discussion sections?

He hasn’t mentioned any preferences. He did say his current class sizes average around 30 students.

What is his preferred size of school?

How does he feel about urban/suburban/town/rural?

He definitely prefers a larger size school in an urban area.

What distance is considered reasonably close to home? 2 hours drive? 6 hours? 10 hours? A nonstop flight?

If I had to guess, a non-stop flight or within 5-6 hours drive would be preferable.

How does your son feel about Greek life?

How important is enthusiasm for intercollegiate sports?

He does marching band, but otherwise I’m not sure how interested he is. Although I would imagine that it would be a ton of fun attending competitive college sports games with colleagues.

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Thank you everyone for the list of suggestions so far. We will do some more research on several of the colleges mentioned.

As for the non-cold preference, I should probably modify my comment to say that even though it’s a factor, the education quality and campus can trump over it. He loved the campus at Stanford, although the distance is obviously a factor; that’s why there’s a question mark as he’s not 100% sure. He also really liked the BU campus, even though we know it gets cold there (I lived in Boston/Cambridge for 10 years). And as for URochester, he threw that out there based on several of his friends who decided to double-major along with music at Eastman; I kind of agree that maybe that one might be stricken from the list :grin:

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Please don’t conflate or equate a U.S. News ranking with this. At all schools, there are some good and not so good.

You will most certainly encounter bigger, sometimes much bigger, than 30 classes at flagships.

Good luck.

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So then why UVA or Va Tech. I get the ROI part.

But then why Penn State or Purdue. OSU will be cheaper than Penn State and hits the urban although it’s a few miles off downtown. Same with Lehigh which won’t hit ROI, isn’t large and not really urban. Love Pitt and it’s safe but the ROI isn’t there.

U of Arizona - a street car from downtown and ASU both work minus the distance but both are easily reached from their airports. Maybe VCU in state ?

I listed Delaware b4 - after reading urban then no but over UMD because of the ROI part but UMD works from an urban part.

Also except for the cold - UMN but they have tunnels.

Define Deep South ? UCF could also work. Is Florida Deep South or is that more the Ga, Bama, MS of the world. Miami of Ohio mentioned b4 wouldn’t work based on urban but how about U of Cincinnati ? Fine school. Great price. And NC State too - and how far South is too far ? U of SC brings a lot from the Northeast and your son would get fantastic merit. UNCC would easily bring a nice cost. Far away but meets desire Seattle… San Diego State…

Just a few more thoughts based on the latest answers.

Sticking with ROI so I didn’t go to full pay only but CWRU could be a sub for Rochester and they have merit. I don’t think of either of them as ‘large’.

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For me, the ROI comment plays in a couple of different ways.

  • Your son is undecided. He may decide on an ABET-accredited path for engineering. He may do something else. Spending a certain amount of money so that he can enter undecided and then switch to any field he eventually desires is money I consider well spent (in contrast to schools with capacity-constrained majors that won’t let students enter the major if they didn’t declare it on their applications or that they need a super high GPA on prereqs to qualify or they need to go through a holistic review process a year or two into college to see if they get their desired major).
  • That said, if your son thinks that engineering is a possibility, I would suggest that, he starts his first semester with all the classes that an engineering student would need to take, as it’s a lot easier to switch out of engineering than into engineering (in part because of course sequencing…missing part of the sequence can add a semester or a year on.)
  • If your son was confident he wanted to do engineering and he’d had some previous experiences that justified that belief (like participation in summer engineering programs or similar), then there are many excellent arguments for not going to a Top X school, as most of them aren’t the greatest for engineering anyway. That, however, does not appear to be the case. But great, motivated students can do well coming out of any school.

Below are some additional schools that you may want to consider. If they’re more than 5-6 hours away by car, then they likely have a direct flight to the D.C. area. Additionally, almost all of them offer merit aid, even when it’s tough odds to get. The likelier the school, the better the chances for merit aid, with the exception of the Virginia publics.

Extremely Likely (80-99+%)

  • Fairfield (CT): About 4800 undergrads

  • U. of Cincinnati (OH): About 30k undergrads, with a heavy co-op focus at this school. Your son would likely receive generous merit aid and would be competitive for a full ride. And Ohio freezes the tuition for 4 years, so there won’t be any 4-5% increases every year either.

  • U. of Delaware: About 19k undergrads

  • U. of Louisville (KY): About 16k undergrads; as a National Merit Semi-Finalist he’d get almost free tuition ($28k scholarship and OOS tuition is $28,978). The Speed School of Engineering is well-reputed and follows the same hands-on model as Cal Poly – San Luis Obispo.

  • U. of Tulsa (OK): About 2600 undergrads, so smaller than your son’s preference. I imagine there’s a nonstop flight from the D.C. area, so within the “reasonable” distance. 25% of the entering class were National Merit Finalists. Why? Full ride. That’s a lot of ROI and I thought it was worth a mention for a school with ABET-accredited engineering fields and some definite music options.

  • Virginia Commonwealth: About 21k undergrads

Likely (60-79%)

  • Binghamton (NY): About 14k undergrads

  • George Washington (D.C.): About 11k undergrads, especially if he likes the urban campuses

  • U. of Maryland: About 30k undergrads

  • Virginia Tech: About 30k undergrads

Toss-Up (40-59%)

  • Lehigh (PA ): About 5600 undergrads

  • UVA: About 17k undergrads

  • Villanova (PA ): About 7k undergrads (might need to get more music opportunities in the community than from the school)

Lower Probability (20-39%)

  • Case Western (OH): About 6k undergrads. With its relationship with the Cleveland Institute of Music, I think this could be a great fit for your son. But your son would need to show a lot of demonstrated interest…

Low Probability (less than 20%)

  • Brown (RI): About 7600 undergrads

  • Duke (NC): About 6600 undergrads

  • Johns Hopkins (MD): About 6k undergrads

  • Princeton (NJ): About 5600 undergrads

  • Vanderbilt (TN): About 7200 undergrads

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Well, Boston on the same list of cold cities is listed as #20. Not too bad :laughing:.
I think BU and URochester are great schools. If BU is a really good fit, then consider ED there. He will get accepted. The question is does he want to use his ED for Stanford (very iffy acceptance), CMU (possible), Harvard (slim chance), or Columbia (not a big chance)? Check does BU has ED2 (if ED1 will not happen at his top choices.)
Caution about our experience with CMU. DD applied for Engineering RD. She got a letter stating that she can choose any Engineering, but not Computer Engineering. We also learned that Biomedical was possible only as Second major (I guess she did not read all websites very carefully). So investigate carefully if you plan to ED.

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I liked @AustenNut suggestions of Case (DD got some merit there, but you need to show CASE a lot of interest - a simple visit may not work), and Villanova(a very solid option.) I frankly not sure about UMD. I know it is a bit higher ranked then VaTech but lower than UVA. If UMD OOS tuition higher then UVA and VaTech, I am not sure it is a good ROI.

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I hope he will do a music supplement with video/recording, music resume and letter(s) of recommendation related to music. It helps to ask schools what they accept and want.

Many of us have learned through experience that these supplements can sometimes help a lot with admissions. So I think Harvard, Stanford et al are reasonable as long as he has a list that includes schools he likes and can get into.

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Northern Virginia public schools have a lot of high gpa kids so it is often extremely competitive for kids from that area to get into UVA and VaTech. I think an application to MD is a good hedge just in case he doesn’t get in either. Just make sure to apply EA to both VaTech and MD since that’s when they give almost all their acceptances. If choosing among acceptances from all three, I agree MD would be the least desirable from a cost perspective.

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Note that Stanford and Harvard have REA, not ED.

True, based on cost alone. But I suggested it because of the opportunity to pursue musical interests along with engineering/STEM. Maybe UVA and VT have similar opportunities, but a worthy hedge as @Baltmom23 said.

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Maybe I should clarify he ROI consideration. I personally believe that my son can get a great education at many, many colleges that won’t cost us 90k/year. But if after serious discussion he has his heart set on a particular college, then we will support him going there regardless of cost (after exhausting all possible merit aid opportunities).

For example, we visited UVA and VT already; he liked the UVA atmosphere and campus a lot and many already-graduated friends from HS went there, so those are on the list. And he specifically chose Lehigh from his own research; we plan on visiting in the next few weeks.

His mother and grandparents lived in Pittsburgh and he also liked both Pitt and CMU campuses, hence those being on the list. As for CWRU, it was on the list originally but fell off as we were hesitant to add additional colleges without removing any for fear of too many college applications.

One of the reasons he is considering Engineering is because my wife and I were Engineering majors. Neither of us is an engineer now, but I firmly believe that my engineering background prepared me to become who I am today. But I also recognize that the hyper-selectivity of engineering college applicants today is totally different than in my time; I would rather he have the freedom to explore and choose for himself.

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He is definitely planning to include the materials you discussed as part of his music supplement. He has already investigated and found clarinet teachers at the schools on his current list to contact. I didn’t know if that would help him, but I assume it can’t hurt?