Anyone know of a fairly prestigious college (my ACT is 33, my weighted GPA is 4.08 (3.7 UW) that has a warm climate/good weather (no snow) and not located in California?
Thanks!
Here’s a fairly basic list:
Clemson
Alabama (your stats = full ride)
William & Mary
UVA
Wake Forest
UNC CH
Davidson
Georgia Tech
Vandy
UT Austin
Baylor (does Waco have snow?)
Arizona State (it’s in a freaking desert!)
Good luck!
Rice University.
Houston has palm trees (like SoCal), shady oaks (like the Gulf Coast and central Florida), and very mild, temperate weather during most of the academic year. It’s also a large, multicultural city with all sorts of activities to engage your attention outside the classroom.
The Rice campus is built in a Mediterranean vein that has affinities with the style that you would find at schools like Stanford, Scripps, and UCLA. It’s not “collegiate gothic,” but it fits very well with the warm, sunny climate.
Two other schools not mentioned thus far also deserve your consideration.
If you can live with chilly mornings in the winter and the very occasional dusting of snow, then Emory (in Atlanta) would be a plausible target school for you; aside from Rice, it’s the warmest and most southerly of the “prestigious” private universities outside of California.
The University of Miami ranks lower on the prestige scale, but it’s still a very good school–and a solid match rather than a reach, given your stats. It’s the top choice if you’re going for a downright tropical vibe.
Tulane!
Duke, Georgia Tech, UNC, Davidson
What’s your major?
TAMU for Engineering
USCarolina for International Business
I’ll add more to the list:
In NC (ok, you may have a little bit of snow, but just enough to make it look pretty; warm weather March-November):
Duke
Elon
High Point Univ.
Catawba College
In AL:
Samford
In VA:
Univ of Richmond (not sure if they get snow)
Washington & Lee University
James Madison Univ
In MD (Baltimore – maybe this isn’t warm enough?)
Johns Hopkins
In SC:
College of Charleston
In FL:
U Miami (probable $25k/year Presidential scholarship with your stats)
U of FL
Rollins College
Stetson U.
Flagler College
In TX:
SMU
Trinity Univ.
In GA:
Emory
U of GA
Berry College
In New Orleans:
Tulane
In TN:
Sewanee - The Univ of the South
Belmont
Good suggestions so far. I’ll add Southern Methodist, in Dallas, to the list.
There’s also Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama; Rhodes College in Tennessee; Guilford College in NC; Southwestern University in TX; Furman University and Wofford College in SC.
If Maryland is warm enough for you, there’s Goucher College as well. And right next door in DC, there’s American University. It doesn’t snow very often in MD/DC area.
University of Hawaii at Manoa!
Also, Eckerd College in FL is on the “Colleges That Change Lives” list.
Adding to that list–Hendrix College, interesting school
Adding: Agnes Scott, which has personalized attention, great traditions, a beautiful campus, and excellent sciences and other fields, cross registration at Emory and would probably toss merit aid to you. It also has a great mascot, IMHO. https://www.agnesscott.edu/studentlife/index.html
And echoing-- Rhodes, Rice, Duke, William and Mary, and Emory as especially strong schools.
If you like the idea of starting at an LAC-sized school and then moving naturally to a university-sized school, you may be interested to know that Emory has two entry points for first years. One is it’s main campus. The other is called Oxford and is small and personalized. You move onto the main campus at year 3. http://apply.emory.edu/discover/
U of F at Gainesville has a great reputation.
New College of Florida is right on the beach, has no grades (but is very rigorous) and is well regarded, and offers liberal arts college-level of personal attention. https://www.ncf.edu/
It’s also offering some guaranteed scholarships for OOS freshmen – https://www.ncf.edu/admissions/cost-and-aid/scholarships/
I would focus on UMiami, Tulane, Emory. GaTech, Wake Forest and Davidson as pretty good matches (or low reach) for your stats.
There are also a number of reaches as well that fit (Duke, Vandy, UVA, UNC and Rice) but I assume that you are already aware of them.
What is your major and career goal?
How much will your parents pay each year? Ask them, please don’t guess. We see later posts from a lot of disappointed students who thought their parents would pay more.
Yep, Wake Forest, Davidson, Emory, Tulane, Miami, Rice, and SMU. All very nice campuses. You will get snow and cold weather at Maryland schools, even UVA and Richmond, though weather during the school year is generally nice. Good luck.
@Nojotennis wrote
Actually, with her stats, it’s full tuition at Bama. Full ride is for NMF kids.
May get some money at U Miami, although they’re notorious for front-loading scholarships. No place really has weather like California, though. No snow pretty much precludes every place but Arizona, some parts of Texas, and Florida.
Heck, it snowed in Walt Disney World this January, so I can’t even really include Florida…
U Texas - a public ivy
U Georgia
What does “prestigious” mean to you?
“May get some money at U Miami, although they’re notorious for front-loading scholarships.”
@MotherOfDragons What do you mean by front-loading? Most of the kids that we knew who went there last year had 4 year merit scholarships.
If you do some poking around on CC, there has been some discussions regarding the first year scholarships being very generous, and then second, third and forth year iterations of it being less so. Some other schools are notorious for doing the same thing-American jumps to mind. Just make sure you check what the reward is for all four years of school, and make sure you see it in writing.
^ Got it. Come to think of it, when DD got his packet from UM, it had listed the scholarship at 4 years for a total of $104k. Later when they sent him some stuff by email, there was a PDF letter which capped the award at $52k. Fortunately, we kept the original letter!
What is prestigious to you? With a 3.7 UW GPA, it would help to know what you are looking for in “prestige”.