I mean, Georgetown is already on her list…
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Barnard is a small school.
My bad. It was such a long list I missed all the names. Obviously they’ve given thought. Then USF is a fine suggestion. Maybe DePaul too.
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Do you think you might be NMSF? That could change your list.
Do you want to play hockey in college? If so, maybe worth a shot to contact some coaches.
Just my opinion but you really only need 1-2 safeties. Most of your targets are reaches.
Maybe add Fordham and Syracuse? American too.
The best way to pay back your parents is do well in school, enjoy your 4 years, make some friends and mature as a person. Worth more than any amount of money you could repay. Good luck.
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I can only speak from my own experience on this, but I will say that I am a staunch atheist, and as someone who leans pretty far left, have A LOT of issues with the Catholic Church in particular…And I am also an alumna of both Fordham and Georgetown, and actually a HUGE fan of Jesuit education in general. So I personally don’t think it’s worth automatically ruling out, even if you don’t share their religious beliefs. But this is just my opinion and my personal experience - obviously, for some, any religious element could be a dealbreaker. But, as mentioned above, she has a few Catholic-affiliated schools on her current list, including one Jesuit one, so maybe she is open to considering that.
Yes - I get it. I would never consider one nor would my kids - but there are large Jewish populations at Jesuit and catholic schools.
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You are 8-9 months away from applying, and these teachers have already written their LoRs? You aren’t planning on growing / maturing / evolving / achieving anything further between now and then?
Also, the reachiest schools on your list generally prefer a humanities and a stem LoR, not two from the same side of the aisle. You have 2 humanities LoRs, which seems particularly odd given your interest in Env Sci as a possible major.
Re: APs- the 3 self-studies will not help your admissions outcomes even the tiniest bit. And, as a veteran of all of your senior year APs (except French & Latin instead of Spanish), I think you are overloading. Art Hx in particularly has a huge volume of work. Autumn of senior year you have an invisible extra class, called college apps, (and you look as though you are planning on doing a lot of apps!), plus whatever senior leadership role(s) you take on. Be careful.
I think you are actually in a pretty good place for an academically ambitious Junior in early spring. It is exactly the right time to start with a long list and figuring out what’s most important to you. And you already have a lot of feedback on some of your estimations and some practicalities.
However: you have some hard work to do for yourself. You have a laundry list of possible majors and a double sized laundry list of colleges, which is pretty much the same list as the majority of high achieving students in the mid-Atlantic.
You need to think more, and harder, about who you are and what kind of environments are best for you. Given the breadth of your interests, which colleges will best give you the room, and the advising, to explore the areas you are interested in? Some of the large state universities that you have listed are not famous for having a lot of advising resources. Others have a strong structured core or a lot of distribution requirements- would you welcome having lines to color inside, or would you like more flexibility? What about campus culture? for example, I don’t think that there are many students who would be equally happy at Lehigh & Barnard vs Lehigh & Dartmouth. Besides being famous places that you / your family would be proud of, what do Princeton & Stanford have in common for you?
Keep coming back to your list over the next 6 months. All of the Collegekids have found that their lists evolved a lot as they started down the ‘why this college’ road. Just be sure that you have a safety and some real matches that won’t make you cry if that’s what you end up with- nobody thinks that it will happen to them, and every year we see it happen!
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Agree with many pp’s that some of your safeties and most of your matches are reaches. Please be sure there’s at least one true safety that you would be very happy to attend. That’s the most important part of the application process, as, if you have that, you’re golden no matter what.
Nobody had commented on this yet, but it sounds like you are at least thinking of attending law school. If that is a serious consideration, and if the pot of money that your parents have saved for you is not unlimited, then you may seriously want to consider going to a school that will give you merit aid. This helps you in two ways. First, you come out of college with some money still left for your education. Law school is very expensive (likely $250k or more for three years at a private school) and it’s much harder to get merit aid in law school than it is in undergrad. Second, if you go to a non-reach school that gives you aid, there’s a decent chance the the academic competition will be a little less steep and it will be easier to get top grades. Law school admissions is almost exclusively based on GPA and test scores, and they don’t really care what your undergraduate institution was. You would do yourself a huge favor by graduating from Fordham with a 3.8 as opposed to graduating from NYU with a 3.4. Plus, Fordham is much more likely to give you some merit aid, so in that scenario you’ve likely 1) saved money and 2) increased your odds of admission to a top tier law school
If law school is potentially in your future, it’s really important to play the long game.
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I agree with many of the comments from up above regarding your most of your list being tougher for admission than you’ve categorized them, and the need to hone in on what you want from a college, and the importance of thinking of the longer term if law school is a serious possibility.
As you are hard of hearing, I would pay careful attention to what kind of accommodations the universities make. As you delve deeper into a more narrowed list of schools, I would also try to et in contact with other students who are hard of hearing at those campuses to talk to them about their experiences.
These are some schools that I think check a lot of your boxes that also offer some kind of a degree in American Sign Language, deaf studies, sign language interpretation, audiology, or teaching of students with hearing impairments. Although you have stated no particular interest in those fields, I suspect that faculty members in these departments would try and make sure that their own university was providing adequate supports to its own students. I also tried to focus more on safeties & matches, though I also include reaches here as well if they had degrees in any of the above fields (including schools that were on your original list…showing that they qualify here as well).
- Boston U.
- College of New Jersey
- CUNY City College (if NYU’s your favorite, then this seems like another good option to consider)
- George Washington (D.C.)
- Indiana U.
- NYU
- Northeastern (MA)
- Ohio State
- Temple (PA )
- Towson (MD) - which also is part of the Baltimore Collegetown consortium…allowing cross-registration at other universities, like Goucher or Johns Hopkins
- U. of Cincinnati (OH)
- U. of Minnesota
- U. of New Mexico
- U. of Rochester (NY)
- U. of Wisconsin
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Actually the ONLY way to know if adequate supports are given is to contact the disabilities office at each of your colleges of interest. The professors in each department are not responsible for setting up modifications.
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I would just second the advice of others to add some true safeties to the list. You’re in-state at Rutgers. I would agree Rutgers admission is highly likely, but Rutgers might lose your application or some other issue might crop up. Your other safeties are mostly publics, which may have wildly varying admission rates for out-of-state students depending on their policies and demand. And New Jersey is not a “desirable” state for most of those schools from a geographic diversity perspective. NYU at least is not as selective as the top reach schools on your list (Georgetown should also be moved to reach), and should be friendly to candidates not needing aid.
If you add some rolling admission schools to your list, you can secure an admission that would save you from applying to other less desirable safeties. This has been very important in taking some pressure off for my kid (thanks Pitt!). Other true safeties would be privates with 50%+ acceptance for which your stats are clearly in the top quartile.
I feel as though your ultimate application chances would depend on the kind of narrative you create for your own journey. I see lots of strong EC activity, but don’t get a feel for your true goals. Plus a somewhat mixed academic record that also doesn’t sell itself, except for your junior year - hoping that everything finishes strong for you.
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Re: law school. Law school prestige matters tremendously, as there are too many lawyers in the US, and not everyone gets jobs. Personally, my advice would be to aim for a top 10 law school or not bother, unless you know you want to practice in a small town, or some more local option. (Cue the outrage 
)
I think more than enough has been said about finances. It is 100% up to OP and her family how to finance law school, these are not unsophisticated people. In my own case, my parents paid for 1 year, I took out loans for the other two years. I also financed a graduate law degree by banking most of my summer associate’s salary by living with my Great-Aunt. I paid back my loans in 2 years, and more than paid my parents back for the year they financed.
That said, I hated being a lawyer, so OP, consider working as a paralegal or at a job that exposes you to the practice of law. Most lawyers do not like being lawyers.
I like @AustenNut’s list of potential schools. Focus on urban schools, if you know that environment is your first choice.
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Yes, I totally agree with you. I was just thinking that a list composed of schools with those majors is likely to have a higher percentage of schools providing adequate supports than a list of schools without any of those majors. OP (and anyone who needs additional supports) should also check out more in-depth on the services at every particular college they’re thinking of applying to.
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You always give great advice and you are very thoughtful in your responses.
Thumbs up @AustenNut !
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Quote from today’s article in NYT:
"Elite law school degrees don’t repair or overcome a lower-status undergraduate degree,” she said. “You can’t scrub your undergraduate degree with a law degree.”
and:
There can be a clubby quality to the justices’ remarks about the schools they attended. Chief Justice Roberts, who has two Harvard degrees, was asked in 2009 whether Supreme Court justices “could relate to ordinary folks.”
[The chief justice said] he wanted to dispel a myth. “Not all justices went to elite institutions,” he said. “Some of them went to Yale.”
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Something like nyu or ucla, where people from all over attend those schools. People with different interests would be key so I guess I’m looking for a college with a lot of majors offered.
Thank you, I’ll definitely apply EA at a lot of these places.
I have taken the oct sat 2022
I’ll consider it thank you!
I don’t mind a jesuit school as long as majority of the population is not jesuit themself as I am looking for diversity.