University of Alabama at Huntsville also offers excellent merit aid, does not have football, is Greek-lite, and is well known for STEM. It is more like UT-Dallas. Perhaps a closer to home alternative?
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Having grown up in a single (low) income, foreign language speaking, first gen parent household and having had to work full time in college and take out loans I am familiar with the challenges such kids face. We can disagree but please don’t dismiss my experience or perspective based upon your perception of my current situation or resources. I worked hard, had people that helped me and was very lucky.
That experience has informed my view that determination and resilience allow people not to have to settle, while I am a pragmatist and realize that unfortunately some do.
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Please note edits. Sorry, I was playing catch-up.
Seconding HarveyMudd (if you are intense and love Social Sciences/Humanities to balance out intense STEM) or Scripps (women’s college); Smith, Bryn Mawr; Hamilton, Wesleyan, adding Connecticut College which I haven’t seen listed yet; St Olaf, Gustavus Adolphus, and look into Lawrence (Wisconsin) which is nationally-known for Physics; WPI, Lafayette, Grinnell? Case Western Reserve?
Run the NPC fo each one: some will be extra generous, factoring the cost of travel into you FA package for instance.
As for safeties, UT Dallas would match what you want and is a super safety. My sense is that videogames are way bigger than football watching on that campus and they don’t have a football team anyway. Tech students are the stars lol.
YMMV: My concern with some states like TX, OK or AL is their health care policies. It may or may not matter to you.
Any college that’s 20% acceptance and under is an automatic reach.
Lawrence, St Olaf, Gustavus Adolphus are targets if you demonstrate interest (join their mailing list with your college-dedicated email address, check regularly, open their emails, click on the links that interest you).
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Hi. I’m a current senior here in Wuhan, China, and I have very similar overall stats as yours. (4.0 UW GPA, 1530 SAT, 8 APs (five 5s, three 4s)) From what I know about college admissions from my peers and senpais, at least, I am not even remotely considering schools like Caltech and MIT since I don’t have any super impressive awards or extracurriculars and didn’t take like 25 APs or smth like that. I think your gender and first generation background will definitely be helpful for your application for a physics major, but since we’re talking about MIT and Caltech here, I gotta say your chances are not the best. (From my perspective)
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International admissions are quite different from domestic admissions, particularly where it concerns US applicants from rural and/or under-resourced areas. (Plus, even within the category of international admissions, it’s tough applying from an over-represented country such as China or India.) So there are a number of reasons why your experience, while completely valid, doesn’t necessarily generalize to be predictive in the OP’s situation. That said, the point that MIT and Caltech are long shots for everyone is well taken. (And other contributors’ points that MIT and Caltech are not automatically the best environment for a given applicant, just by virtue of their reputations, are also well-taken.)
Hope you make a thread about your own situation; hopefully you could get some helpful suggestions!
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About UT Dallas, is the statistic of 23% of undergrad students living on-campus out of date? Also I recall that it didn’t have a freshman on-campus housing requirement or guarantee.
It has honors housing, so the sub-community of students on the NMF package definitely gets a residential experience. Non-honors has a larger commuter population. I don’t know if the figure is out of date… and I never know what to make of those percentages anyway, because some “23% on campus” schools have a huge share of undergrads clustered in nearby housing, whereas others are dominated by true commuters.
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UT Dallas’ common data sets, section F1, tend to indicate that around half of frosh live in the dorms, and about a quarter of all undergraduates live in the dorms. This suggests that UT Dallas is about half residential and half commuter (based on the frosh percentage in the dorms), and the common pattern of residential students living nearby off campus in later years appears to be the case there.
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Not worried about abortion laws but slightly concerned of UT Dallas as commuter school. Would lots of people already know each other. I liked smith and Wellesley online but know they have a reputation for being very politically correct. How accurate is that?
Probably about half of frosh are local commuters (the half of frosh not living in the dorms). However, UT Dallas draws commuters from a much larger region than a typical high school, so it is not like a local commuter who just graduated from high school is likely to know more than a small number of other students there. Also, some of the local commuters are likely to be non-traditional students.
Smith has a politically engaged student body, so that might not be for you. But Wellesley is just like your average college in this respect.
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At any school with 20K students, you’re going to make most of your friends in a sub-community of some sort. At UTD, it will be the Honors College, where you’ll have both housing and classes with high-achieving students like yourself. A few of these may be local, but not enough to be a problem in terms of your experience. (In fact, it can be nice to have a few friends who know the area and have family nearby.) I don’t think the commuter aspect should be a worry for you. Look more into academic programs, extracurricular opportunities, and so on, and see what you think of the other aspects of the school.
ETA: @fiftyfifty1 knows a young woman who is attending UTD on the NMF package and is having a very positive experience. They could offer a more personal perspective re: your concerns.
In terms of safeties, Tulsa may offer a social experience that’s more like the smaller universities you like, and their NMSF/NMF package is more of a true full ride than UTD’s. But UTD is more of a heavy-hitter as a STEM research university, and the Honors College still provides a smaller, high-performing cohort. So, it all depends on your priorities. No need to pick a single front-runner safety ahead of time! But of course you do need to compare enough to narrow down which ones to apply to.
(ETA: Gotta say, this was a pretty boring hoax! Weird.)
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Yes I meant abortion restrictions/bans&related healthcare plus trans health care. As I said, YMMV, so if it’s not a concern it keeps a lot of states on the table.
UTD Honors students have housing so they have their own small college within the university. They’re not impacted by the commuter population. And as was shown above, many commuters live nearby so outside of Honors there’d still be students living on campus and near campus.
Smith is quite political indeed; it was listed because it is very strong in science, but all women’s colleges are strong in science so it’s just a degree of excellence. Based on what you say, it wouldn’t be a good fit.
Wellesley is more competitive and more “conservative” than Smith (in a “preprofessional” way). Mount Holyoke too. Barnard’s policy wrt nonbinary students could be seen as very strict.
This is all relative of course: none of these colleges are conservative, in part because, in trends dating back almost a century, young people identify as less conservative globally than older adults (Millennials/GenZ seem to be changing the typical evolution though) and new generations always try to improve and change what the previous generations left for them, often in ways that make older adults uncomfortable; and each region of the country has different political histories which impact their general outlook&views outside of the radical-progressive-moderate-conservative-reactionary spectrum, so that colleges in MA would be in a very different environment than colleges in the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, or the MidAtlantic.
http://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/09/01/america-life-expectancy-regions-00113369
Have you looked into Vanderbilt, Rice, Emory (esp.Emory Oxford to make it more accessible), Davidson, Sewanee, W&L? Some may be less of a culture shock and might be a better fit than, say, Smith.
Are you interested in Catholic (like ND, Holy Cross MA) or Evangelical colleges (like Wheaton, IL or Messiah, PA)?
Sadly, I need to close this thread because it is a hoax. I’m unsure what motivates this bored kid to waste everyone’s time.
Here are some of this troII’s other fake accounts: