Chance me!!!

Chance Me / Match Me!
1

Hi guys! I’m currently a junior in high school, and I am working on a college list. I’ve posted a chance me thread on here before, however that was before I knew many important factors such as how much my parents were willing to pay, and what type of school I wanted to attend. I think I have put together a balanced list of schools. Obviously I will not be applying to all 21 of these schools because that is far too many, but I am wondering if this list seems pretty balanced in terms of reach/match/safety, or is it too reach heavy? Also my parents make a combined income of almost $200k a year so we are not expecting any need-based aid, however my parents have also said they will not pay a net cost of over $40k per year. Looking at previous admitted students threads I feel as though I could get some merit aid at most of these schools with my stats. Should I expect this? I have a 32 act, but plan on retaking it in June (aiming for a 34+) and by the end of my junior year I will have a 3.8 UW & 4.5 W gpa. I am currently taking four ap courses (chem, calc ab, apush, & lang), as well as a double period adv biotech course and anatomy. Next year I will be taking 5 aps (physics 1, bio, stats, gov, & lit).

Extracurriculars:

  • I’ve been in student council all 4 years, and
    my junior and senior year I got a varsity letter in student council (meaning I attended 90% of the meetings and held committee head positions for homecoming and blood drives).
  • I’ve spent the past 3 summers volunteering as a counselor for a girls in stem camp for my school district where middle school girls do science oriented activities, and also learn how to build and program robots.
  • I’m also a leader of my schools girls in stem club, that hosts camps occasionally throughout the school year for middle and elementary school girls interested in the stem field.
  • I have 200+ volunteer hours at a local hospital. I’ve volunteered in multiple departments including transportation (transporting patients to their rooms, x-rays, ct scans, etc by wheelchair), nutrition (preparing and delivering patient’s specialized meal orders), admitting desk (admitting people into the hospital, answering calls, showing people directions to places, etc), and emergency admitting (helping to admit people into the emergency department)
  • I have 50+ hours shadowing a family friend who is a physician. Since I know her pretty well, she allowed me to do things that an ovserver wouldn’t normally be allowed to do such as enter patient info into the computer, etc, and I learned a lot through this experience.
  • I have been a member of a Hindu youth group affiliated with my temple since freshman year. My sophomore year I was the treasurer, and now I am the Vice President. Through the youth group I have done a lot of community service for the temple, and hosted many fundraisers to raise money for the temple as well.
  • At the start of my junior year I joined DECA. I placed 2nd place for my test in hotel and lodging management at the regional level, and qualified for state where I placed 9th for my roleplay out of around 100 people in my event.
  • I have been taking bollywood dance classes for 12 years, and have also been performing at various cultural events for that long.
  • For the past 2 years I have also been choreographing and teaching bollywood dance to a group of 8-10 year old girls, for them to perform at local cultural events. They perform about 3 times a year.
  • Since my choreographing and teaching was a success I set up a summer bollywood dance camp this summer, and about 15 girls attended. All money made from this camp were donated to a charity run by a close family friend of ours in India, and will be helping an indian orphanage with disabled children. I plan to do it again this summer.
  • During my sophomore and junior school year I tutored 3 4th graders in English
  • I’m a member of make-a-wish club, which is a club that holds fundraisers throughout the school year to raise money to grant the wish of a terminally ill kid (in partnership with the make-a-wish foundation)
  • I’m a member of the national honor society
  • I’ve also been a member of my schools medical society since freshman year.
  • For the past 4 years I have spent a few days over the summer volunteering at our public libraries summer reading program desk, and handing out stickers, prizes, etc to kids who complete the summer reading challenges
  • I’m a part of a program at my school called the 21st century medical professions academy. It’s a highly selective program I applied for as an 8th grader (it required multiple essays and an interview process), and through this program I am able to take higher level science courses such as advanced biotechnology, and honors genetics, (so I have a lot of lab experience).
  • One of the opportunities for this program is that senior year I can choose to complete a medical internship during my 7th hour of school. If we want to do the internship we get to choose what kind of internship we want, and I have chosen to complete one with either a psychiatrist or an obstetrician. Both are fields I am highly interested in, and I am hoping this will give me a lot of experience.
  • I’m in the process of securing a research internship for the upcoming summer in a cancer lab at the university of kansas medical center.
  • Over the summer I am also going to volunteer over the weekends with an organization that helps adults with learning disabilities, and teach them how to read, write, etc
  • I have been taking art classes for 8 years, and it’s probably the hobby I spend the most time on
  • One of my other favorite hobbies is baking.

If you couldn’t tell looking at my extracurriculars and course list I am very interested in science. I want to major in psychology on the premed track.

Here are the schools on my list so far:

safeties:
university of kansas (in state)
university of south florida
florida state university
arizona state university
baylor university
university of alabama

matches:
umiami
tulane
usd
urochester
umntc
ucsb
uw seattle
pitt

reaches:
northeastern university
case western reserve university
university of southern california
emory university
washington university st louis
rice university
vanderbilt university
johns hopkins university

2

can someone answer this?

3

If you are chasing merit money, I don’t think you are going to see it at some of those reach schools. My experience with my daughter was that the less competitive the school, the higher that merit scholarship. Regional schools offered full tuition, and private schools enough to bring them down to around the $40K coa level. Once we went below the 30% acceptance rate, there was little to no merit money. My daughter’s stats were just slightly higher than yours. Hopefully you’ll get more feedback since I’m obviously just giving you one anecdote from our experience.

4

@momofsenior1 Thanks for the info! Did your daughter have experience with merit money from any of the specific schools I listed? If so I would love to have more info!

5

Honestly, you aren’t going to get any scholarships from the reach schools more than likely. Although, there is a good chance that you will potentially even get a full-ride at some of the safety schools.

6

As long as you are able to get a 27+ ACT and a 3.8 GPA, which you have, you will get an automatic scholarship to the University of Alabama-Montgomery. I know because that’s likely what I will do.

7

As long as you are able to get a 27+ ACT and a 3.8 GPA, which you have, you will get an automatic scholarship to the University of Alabama-Montgomery. I know because that’s likely what I will do.

8

My D got a lot of merit from Northeastern, but some of it could have been from need, not sure. Admissions though sure got tighter though in the 2 years since she enrolled.

The UC schools rarely give out merit unless you are a Regents so you can probably forget about UCSB. The rest of the reach and match schools on your list probably don’t give out much from what I could tell.

9

UCSB is around $65K/year for an OOS student. As stated in the above post, Regents at UCSB (top applicants) gives $6000/year towards costs. Since you do not qualify for need-based aid, you are looking at a minimum $59K/year to attend so your parents $40K limit excludes this school.

10

northeastern university
case western reserve university
university of southern california
emory university
washington university st louis

i’d say these r high reaches for u but there is still a chance but for vanderbilt & JHU i don’t think u have a great shot (sorry if I sound harsh, I just want to be realistic)

11

@ProfessorPlum168 @Gumbymom thanks for the info! UCSB is most likely one that I am cutting off my list then.

12

@sanjanagupta1 that’s why I have them listed

13

@sanjanagupta1 that’s why I have them listed as reach schools

14

@kcgirl316 My daughter applied to engineering focused schools so her list didn’t overlap with yours at all. Hopefully someone else will have merit experience with some of the schools on your list.

15

I would add more in-state schools to the list like K-State and Wichita State. Also, with choosing a college, stats aren’t everything when it comes to reach/match/safety. A college like Baylor could be a statistical match, but a financial reach. I would take all of those schools and go over the costs with your parents. Chances are, you’ll probably eliminate half the schools on the list when you’re done.

16

@coolguy40 Thanks for the info, but I’m not interested in staying in state for college. I only have KU on there as a last resort back up.

17

In case you didn’t see this recent article about U of Alabama:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-illinois-students-brain-drain-20180405-story,amp.html

18

You need to calculate your EFC, starting at the reach end of your list, to see whether the schools think you have any need (I know it seems unlikely, but do a couple to check).

Then you need to check out the level of merit aid typically given out. You can find it for each college at collegedata.com- go to the ‘money matters’ tab; the top line will tell you cost of attendance, then scroll down to the profile of admitted students to see what non-need affiliated merit awards are given out. So, for example, WUSTL COA is $70K/pa; 10% of admitted students got merit aid; the average amount of merit aid was ~$13K. Flip over to the admissions tab and you can see that they admitted 17% of applicants, and that the middle 50% of accepted students had an ACT of 32-34. In coarse terms, I read that as saying that you could well get an offer, but you won’t be somebody that they want to use merit money to encourage to come, and that even if you did get some, you would not get $30K worth, and therefore WUSTL is unlikely to be affordable.

fyi, JHU is even worse for merit money.

19

@sanjanagupta1 Actually, I disagree. I think NEU and CWRU are definitely targets, and Vanderbilt, JHU, and Wash U are reaches. Emory is still a bit of a reach but not as much.

20

Here are some of my recommendations:

  1. Barrett honors college at ASU is well respected nationally and may be worth a look with your stats
  2. UMiami is private and would exceed your budget unless you get lot of merit $$ - go to collegedata.com and look up how much the average non-need based merit is under "money matters " tab
  3. Repeat #2 for all the OOS schools that are mid level; reach schools don’t give merit
  4. For med school, your in-state school is often the most likely to get into. Other public med schools give preferences to their in-state applicant. And the smaller state med schools have tons of applicants from oos. So you will most likely be back instate . The private med schools are very difficult to get into. All med schools are expensive. WIll your parents pay another $60K or so per year for med school on top of the $40K for undergrad?
  5. Doesn’t Kansas have some reciprocal in-state tuition deal with other midwestern states like MN? If so, UMN would be then within your budget and Minneapolis is a nice city.

Keep your EC’s focused. If you’re premed , focus on that. Do realize that you are in a competitive demographic and there will be many applicants with almost perfect stats and who’ve done all the stuff you did. NJ , NY, MA and CA are filled with Indian heritage applicants who have an almost identical profile. Look around on CC and you’ll see the same thing.