<p>@xleet21, </p>
<p>CA residents who are in the top 9% of their class can apply for ELC status at their school when they are juniors. Your HS must be an ELC eligible school, however. If you did not know about this, it may be because your school is not an ELC eligible school OR you were not aware that this was even offered OR you are not in the top 9%. If your school IS on the ELC program and you were eligible but you didn’t apply in your junior year, I would speak to your guidance counselor ASAP to see if you can be added. This gives you a distinct advantage at the UCs and guarantees “auto-acceptance” into one of the lower tiered UCs, as long as certain basic requirements are met, and that one UC can then become your safety school.</p>
<p>What are your financial aid requirements. Will you be needing merit- based aid? If the answer is yes, NYU gives lousy aid and is very expensive to attend and UVA (Virginia) doesn’t give good aid to OOS residents. Getting in at UVA is also much more difficult for OOS residents and NYU has a very competitive applicant pool for business majors, so you are not “in” or necessarily a “match” at either of these schools anyway. UPenn, Stanford, Chicago, Cornell, and Northwestern are all reaches and most likely you will get rejections at all of these schools. Your chances are more realistic at Carnegie Mellon, but IF you are accepted (a big IF) you probably are not going to get much aid, given your stats and resume. That leaves you with Cal and UCLA. If you are NOT an ELC top 9% candidate these schools now become VERY HIGH MATCHES/REACH and HIGH MATCHES/LOW REACH respectively, so it is entirely possible you may also get rejections at one or both of these schools as well. </p>
<p>I would STRONGLY encourage you to apply to some alternate UCs such as UC San Diego and UC Davis or even UC Irvine and UC Santa Barbara-- just in case! </p>
<p>@jdlace,</p>
<p>The term “top-heavy” refers to when an applicant is applying to a list of schools that has mostly reach schools compared to having any match and safety schools.</p>