@soontobecolleger
First, congrats on the great stats. You are going to have great choices. A few thoughts:
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as you know all those schools are exteremly competitive and selective. You have the stats to get into them. A good number of students with your stats will get into them, but it is just too hard to tell exactly which school(s) will respond to your specific profile.
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ED certainly helps at some schools (Penn, for instance.) The stats on the “ED-bump” for various schoosl can be found on-line. But once you pick that school, you’ve committed, so really think it through.
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Finances. Make sure you and whoever will be helping you pay for school sit down with the on-line calculators for any school you are considering (esp. if you are going ED route.) Really budget out the money. Lots of schools say they are “full need” but many have different ways of calculating assets, some include loans, some don’t. You have good enough stats to get merit money at some schools, but the ones on your list above are moslty need only. Once you see what the costs will be have a good long think (and talk with whoever is helping you pay) about whether each school is worth they out-of-pocket/debt you might have to pay to attend.
I think the bottom line is: You have stats that will get you in to a great school. It’s hard to predict exactly which one, and you might have to cast a somewhat wide net. I’d suggest you think a bit about what you like about these schools. Evanston is very different from University City/West Philly. Rural NY is very different from Cambridge. UNC is very different from all of them.
If you like east coast urban, maybe it would make sense to look at, beside Harvard and Penn also Columbia, JHU, Emory, Tufts, BU, Brown, NYU, GW, Vanderbilt etc. (most of them are also expensive, but some, like GW give merit aid)
If you want nice suburbs of a big city or a “smaller” city, Northwestern, Tufts, Princeton, WashU, Duke, Rochester etc.
For bigger, more rural/small town research maybe look at, as well as Cornell, UMich, Dartmouth, Wash&Lee, Elon etc.
As you will likely have a choice of a number of schools, I’d think about the specifics of the type of education you want - what exactly is important to you - and make sure the schools on your list have those attributes.
Last question - did someone tell you to take the SAT again? A 35 ACT is like a 1570 or something. It has to be 99%. That will be tough to hit, moreless beat with the SAT. I think most schools only require one of the two tests. If someone suggested you need an SAT score to be competitive at those schools they may know more than I, but I was under the impression few schools these days care which test you took. You might want to ask your GC.
Hope this helps a bit. Concentrate on a strong application and you’ll have awesome opportunities.
