<p>Hi all,
I'm a junior who is in the process of making the list of colleges I'd like to apply to next year. I've already visited several of them and plan on visiting them by next year.</p>
<p>Here it is:
Princeton University
Duke University
Boston College
UNC Chapel-Hill
U Michigan
College of William and Mary
Williams College
UMass Amherst</p>
<p>I'm still working on my safeties, and I'm still adding colleges. As you can probably tell, I'm a very good student (36 ACT, 2/115 at my school) and I have pretty good ECs.
Thanks!</p>
<p>People would best be able to give you feed back if you specified what you want to study or explained what you’re looking for in a college (size, location, social atmosphere, financial aid, etc).</p>
<p>Have you talked to your parents about how you would pay for college? If your parents are not wealthy enough to full pay, you should use their current tax year data and enter into the NPC to get a good financial picture. The truly good schools are the schools you can pay. Other than that, I’d say you have good a chance as anyone else when it comes to the Princetons and Dukes of the world.</p>
<p>I live in MA. My parents are middle-upper class. We’ve run several Net Price Calculators on different colleges’ websites, and we are going to get very little, if any, FA. So I’d have to get a merit scholarship if I did get one. We do have a decent amount saved up for college from birth, and I’ve saved up some through working jobs. I have applied to several smaller scholarships through places like Fastweb and won some money. I plan to major in Economics, and eventually I’d like to end up on Wall Street in finance. I prefer a smaller school (less than 8K undergrads, so I’m not really a big fan of UNC or UMich). I study hard, but I’d also like a college where I can party.</p>
<p>If you are talking about IB, it is very prestige driven in terms of recruiting. The majority of new employees come from the better known Ivies, Duke, Stanford etc. As you probably know, Ivies don’t offer merit scholarship. Duke has limited merit but it’s extremely competitive. Basically, when you’re looking for merit, you are looking for schools that are a “tier” below your stats. The reason is you have to be in the top 1 or 2% of the entering class to get any significant amount of scholarship. In your case, I’d venture to say, for example, scholarship at Duke is less likely but at UMiami (FL) or Lehigh ¶ is more likely and it could cover half tuition. Just making an example here, not suggesting that you apply to those schools.</p>