<p>Hey,</p>
<p>I'm a Junior in high school right now trying to make some decisions about what colleges to look at and visit. Just the vast amount of information out there confuses me. I'm a strong math/sciences student, and I'm interested in a school that focuses on engineering, hard sciences, etc. My stats, as of now:</p>
<p>GPA (unweighted): 3.3ish
Chem SAT2: 730
PSAT: 2200ish (don't have the papers)</p>
<p>Other than the obvious schools you hear about all the time, such as MIT, caltech, etc, which are some schools I should be looking at? (I want reach schools also, as my stats will be better after my junior year)</p>
<p>Thanks
Julien</p>
<p>Lots of options out there.</p>
<p>Any location preferences? Big or small school preference? What is your state of residence?</p>
<p>I mean i don't want a really small school. I'm a PA resident living right next to Villanova/Bryn Mawr/ Haverford.</p>
<p>Penn State might be a good match for you. Possibly Carnegie Mellon but your GPA is a little low. Pitt might be good. Lehigh. Rutgers. Maryland.</p>
<p>I'd also recommend RPI and Case-Western as they're both a little easier to get into than CMU. After that, there's also WPI. If you're interested in learning more "applied" engineering than theoretical, you can also apply to Rose-Hulman; everything I've heard about them has been positive. </p>
<p>I'd say try to bring your GPA up a bit and you could have a decent shot at most schools out there.</p>
<p>Any more preferences you can give us to climate, distance from home, size of school, atmosphere of college, athletics, or anything else?</p>
<p>Well I'm an active member in my Science Olympiad team which is basically 11-15 hours a week. We were 5th in the nation last year, and we have a pretty prestigious lineage of titles. </p>
<p>AP calc this year (im a junior), ap english, next year will probably take ap stat, ap physics, ap lit, so I should have 5 or 6 APs in total. PSATs are tomorrow I'll report in when i get my scores. </p>
<p>I think i might lean towards a college in a more rural setting, as I love the outdoors. However I don't want to be isolated, a rural town with a big city near it would probably be perfect. Also not too far from PA, like California is probably not what I want. Most importantly, I'm not the type to study all night, I like to work hard and play hard. So the guy/girl ratio cant be 3 to 1 yaknow?</p>
<p>Thank you all for your help by the way, I know there are far too many people on these boards asking for advice.</p>
<p>edit: Also, I don't really like warm...new york, new england, etc. is the perfect climate. Athletics are meh, but college pride like penn state's never hurts haha.</p>
<p>You could try adding WPI for your geographic concerns, then. They're in Worcester (as the name implies) which is a nice small town, and, if I recall the ride correctly, about a 30-45 minute ride into Boston. I know a lot of bands also come to Worcester for their concerts instead of into Boston since there's a large convention center and lots of parking. The school has the typical heavy workload of a tech school, but I don't think it's supposed to be as intense as CMU, Cornell, or one of them. They do run on the trimester system, so classes go a lot faster, so if you're someone like me that prefers to let knowledge stir about in your brain for a little while it might make things a bit difficult (I had semesters in undergrad, and Caltech runs on the quarter system...it's quite an adjustment).</p>
<p>WPI also has two large projects that you're supposed to do. I think one is at the end of your sophomore year, and the other is a senior thesis type project where you're supposed to do some sort of interdisciplinary work. From what I've heard, the people there really like the approach. I really liked the school, but they didn't offer Materials Science as its own major, so I had to turn it down. :(</p>
<p>Rensselaer is also on a pretty campus, although Troy is a bit of a rough town.</p>
<p>You might want to try also posting in the engineering forum below to see what people there have to say. I know one guy went to the Cooper Union, which I think is in NYC somewhere, but I don't know if it's urban like NYU is, or urban like CMU was (as in, actually more suburby).</p>
<p>You could also always look at schools like UIUC, U Michigan, and U Minnesota. They're larger state schools, but all have quality engineering programs.</p>