<p>@DrGoogle Wow. I wasn’t aware of that list. Looks like there isn’t much out there that beats UT-Austin, then, and my worries are silly.</p>
<p>@Fifty Thanks for the advice! I think I’ll go with that strategy since UT and A&M are really, really good safeties.</p>
<p>@ClassicRockerDad Thanks! I hope my essays will be good enough.</p>
<p>@Violet1996 I think it’s going to be on the list, then. Seems like the ideal environment and geographically nice since it’s not too far from Boston, America’s #2 startup hub.</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus I know they have a lot fraternity rate, but they seem to be described as “frat-dominated”- both by my teachers (some of which are members of Texas Exes) and current students. I think they also rank high when it comes to Greek dominance, but yeah I’m aware that it’s huge and I can avoid Greek life if I want to. It’s definitely not a huge defect; I’m trying to find things to look for in other schools so I can decide what’s more preferable than UT-Austin, since that seems to be a very small category.</p>
<p>I don’t think that a student at one school is inherently better than a student at another school. But I don’t think that putting overall student body quality into consideration is an elitist thing; yeah, you can go anywhere and still end up reaching your goals. I don’t avoid conversation with people just because they went to/are going to CC; that would be silly. And I’m aware of the prevalence of self-educated programmers; I’m learning C from one and he’s pretty good. However, I don’t think it’s wrong to say that a higher portion of the kids at UT will be from the crowd I don’t really get along with- compared to my reaches/matches. True, you can find motivated people just about anywhere and UT’s a good place to find them (hence the struggle with finding matches)- but I’d just prefer a student body that’s saturated with people like that instead of one that has high numbers of motivated people but isn’t dominated by that sort of attitude.</p>
<p>Also, the top 7% rule <em>does</em> have an effect on quality. Professors at Cockrell, for example, don’t tend to be as willing to interact with/develop relationships with ECE freshmen and sophomores because there’s a 50% dropout rate for that major in the first year. It’s definitely creating some problems for UT- so that’s why I’m a bit wary of it. I just hope no one’s taking this to mean I think UT’s terrible.</p>
<p>So I think my list looks like this then:</p>
<p>Safety: UT-Austin, Texas A&M, UMass-Amherst
High Match/Reach: Carnegie Mellon, Rice
Reach: Caltech, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, Cornell, Harvey Mudd</p>
<p>Hmm that comes out to 11, so a little bit more than I’d wanted (10). Any suggestions? I’m pretty comfortable with this list if there isn’t something to cut out.</p>