I know you are early in the process but you recently posted the following criteria…
In this thread you mentioned:
(I assume you mean a 4% RD rate).
The only school with that sort of low acceptance rate within a 6 hour drive of Kentucky that I am aware of is Duke and they don’t offer “generous” merit. The Ivies (with the exception of Cornell), UC, Stanford and MIT are the only other schools I am aware of that are as selective (below 5% RD) as you seem to be targeting and all are more than 6 hour drives and none of them offer merit.
Just making sure you are contextualizing what you are looking for versus what exists before you fast forward to strategizing about how to engage an AO.