My daughter is a senior, and we are starting to apply for colleges. We’ve done a lot of research, but are wondering if we might have missed some good choices for her. She is super quirky, very shy, non conforming and doesn’t make friends easily. She wants to major in biology, and is interested in medical research, possibly genetics. We’re looking for a school with good programs in those areas, but somewhere that welcomes kids who don’t meet the usual college mold. We want to focus primarily on California, where we live, or the West Coast but are open to other areas. She does not want a religious school, or anything in the Southern US. She isn’t at all interested in the typical college life, partying doesn’t interest her, neither does sports. So someplace where Greek life and sports are not a big part of the environment. She is going to be applying to UC Santa Cruz, uc Davis, Cal poly in San Luis Obispo, as well as Cal poly Humboldt as her safe school. We’ve toured all of those and thought they might be a good fit. Is there anything we’re missing?
Budget?
Budget is tricky without knowing what kind of financial aid we’ll get. We expect to get a certain amount of needs based aid. And her grandparents have a college fund set aside for her. She could for instance do 4 years at Humboldt with very little debt. But a private college would be out of reach without a significant amount of aid. At this point, we’re mostly interested in figuring out the best colleges and then determining if they’re within her reach.
Reed College in Oregon or Whitman in Washington. Run the NPC’s if she is interested.
Occidental, Pitzer, Reed, Western Washington?
I don’t know much about the student body at Evergreen, but I suspect that a quirky student could find her peeps there. It’s a WUE school, so that provides a nice discount as well. Here is its profile from the Colleges That Change Lives’ website: The Evergreen State College – Colleges That Change Lives
It works the other way around. The budget is what you have available or are willing to spend. Know what you can afford, then run the Net Price Calculator for each school to predict an aid package. But definitely know what you can support financially from the outset.
Look at the Colleges that Change Lives website. Reed, U of Puget Sound and the other excellent suggestion above. I would also add Lewis and Clark.
For any college, you can look for the Net Price Calculator on its web site to get an estimate of financial aid.
Thank you everyone, this is very helpful! We have looked at the net price calculator for many of these suggestions and they are within the range of what we can manage. There are some new suggestions so that we haven’t considered. I will look into those.
Not west coast but Beloit and Juniata are good fits for quirky students
Another vote for Western Washington — my alma mater (I’m also a CA native). Browsing current Instagram posts, students look every bit as quirky now as they were when I attended. No Greek life (of course, there are plenty of parties as there are at all schools), and sports are not a huge deal. WWU has an incredibly beautiful campus, and Bellingham is a fantastic college town! Fairhaven school may also be of interest to your student. It’s a hidden gem and still seems fairly reasonably priced for OOS students.
Forgot Bennington…
Further away but maybe Oberlin.
I can relate to this thread! I am pretty quirky, shy, nerdy, a band kid (I’m a snare drummer in the drum line). I’m majoring in Psychology. But I can’t help on recommendations for California since I’m in Texas (I’m going to Texas A&M) so yeah I guess no southern schools. But I hope your daughter finds a school she can shine at! 
Any large state school is going to have a wide range of student personalities, including the quirky. Even Texas A& M, with 60k kids.
Doesn’t everyone have some quirks?
Of course, whether the student’s specific quirks are accepted or whether they match with characteristics of the school is a different story.
Exactly! I went to a quirky school that fit me perfectly, as it did my friends. However, years after graduation, I met a guy who was there at the same time I was. He confessed that he didn’t like it at all … he was quirky, but the school just wasn’t a fit for him. The good news is that he got his degree and has had a good career & happy life despite not liking his college.
Back in the dinosaur days, I self-identified as a quirky kid, and it seemed like a good idea to go to a LAC known for quirkiness. It turned out that the students there were “quirky” in a certain set of ways that didn’t fit me very well. Maybe I was too quirky, or maybe my west coast quirkiness didn’t match what passed for quirky among the midwest / east coast kids there. I didn’t feel very accepted, outside of my friend group.
Purely for academic reasons, I happened to transfer to a much larger west coast school that did not have a reputation for quirkiness. I expected that I wouldn’t fit in, but it turned out to be much easier to find my people at the larger school.
This is the key! I love this.
Our UC Davis student tour guide told us at the end of the tour that UC Davis had been her last choice school. She ended up liking the school more than she expected… but she also wanted students to know that a school doesn’t have to be the one they thought would be a perfect fit, that it could still work out just fine for them.
I noticed the AP listed some pretty large schools for the target list. I think this is a good thing (and I admit, I love big schools) because sometimes the 'quirkiness of a student doesn’t match that of the other students, and when the school is small, there aren’t a lot of options. A school with only 2000 students is unlikely to have more than 1 student paper, only a few theater productions a year a poetry club (but not 5), etc. A larger school can have more options not just in academics but in how students spend their free time.
Quirky can mean the student doesn’t want to go to football games at a school where it seems like everyone else does (but in reality there are plenty that don’t attend or even know when the games are) or that the student wants to design her own major or wants to spend years painting the hallways and never take an English class (good luck with that). IMO, most schools have a pretty good selection of all kinds of students.
I went to school in Boulder. There were plenty of preppy east coasters attending, lots of granola crunching-birkenstock wearing hippies, more than a few jocks, Greek Geeks, ROTC groups, etc. At the time there were only 16k undergrads and now there are almost double that, but still a wide assortment of students to find others with your interests.