<p>There are several things that you should keep in mind. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>Yale has a < 7% admit rate.</p></li>
<li><p>Neither your father nor you can control who Yale admits. So there is no reason for you not to apply. It takes a few extra essays and an application fee (since you seem to be spending money traveling to visit schools, I assume your parents can afford the fees).</p></li>
<li><p>You should always have a range of schools which span from reach (Yale) to a safety (Minnesota Duluth?) that you can apply to.</p></li>
<li><p>You should try Net price calculators and ensure your parents are willing to pay what is expected. Financial aid is based mostly on parental income and if your parents are not willing to foot the bill, it would be hard to attend an expensive school. So it would be good to have that discussion now. If your parents are willing to pay for Carleton, there is no reason to say no to an east coast school which might cost the same.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Carleton is not the best comparison to Yale or another Ivy, because it is need-aware in admissions and its FA is not as generous as Yale or the other lottery schools. </p>
<p>OP,
If you are “independent. I know how to cook, clean, do laundry, everything that taking care of myself would require” - that mean that you know how to finance your education, which is supported by your statement that your dad’s convictions have nothing to do with financing (I suppose because he is not paying, you will be paying yourself). Then, if you are on your own in any shape or form, why do you need your dad’s approval? This is confusing.
On the other hand, I am happy with my own D’s decisions to stick close to home. This enabled her to have a free UG education and being accepted to several great Med. Schools, one of which she is attending now, only 2 hours from home. It has been helpful for her to be that close and be able to see us frequently as well as meet with her HS and UG friends on a regular basis. She has also graduated #1 from her private HS as well as a top pre-med in her UG class.</p>
<p>If you’re serious about wanting to discover East Coast life and culture, then you need to maximize the odds you’ll end up there.</p>
<p>When you go to the East Coast to visit colleges, you MUST include one women’s colleges=. It may be Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Smith, or Barnard - they’re all very, very good (and, if that matter to you, extremely prestigious and rigourous) but since men can’t apply, it’s a bit easier to get in than at other top schools. In addition, it may be reassuring for your father.
Then add a few schools with 20-30% admission rates, and at least one with a 35-50% admission rate. Sit in the cafeteria and listen to what the students are talking about; introduce yourself, ask them why they chose that college and if they could go back in time would they make the same choice?
Then think of places you liked, write down WHAT you liked about them, and look for places like them throughout New England and the Mid Atlantic (I’m assuming you mean the Northern East Coast).</p>
<p>One way to convince your father is to show him the money = apply to places that offer good financial aid packages (merit and/and need based).
You can look at the geographical diversity of a variety of schools (in the 30+% admit bracket) and see if some have few people from MN or from the Midwest. At these schools, being from rural MN will help (I assume you mean Bemidji or Winona, not suburban-with-lakes-and-green-space like Edina, right?) Apply to these schools in priority. If you’re among the most qualified candidates from MN to these schools, you’ll get a better financial package.
If your family doesn’t have $250,000 ready for your education, in fact if they make up to $180,000, getting admitted to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or one of the top women’s colleges may mean it’ll cost you LESS to attend there than to attend the U. :)</p>
<p>I agree with the women’s college advice in every way EXCEPT they don’t offer the major the OP has mentioned (architecture). OP, you still haven’t commented on the high unemployment rate for architecture majors posted near the top of the thread. Also, as you have probably noticed, this major really limits your college choices as it is not offered at an awful lot of schools. Just going to ask… how seriously have you considered this? Is this a “dream” career (sort of like Yale) that sounds great, but you haven’t actually known any real architects or shadowed anyone? It seems to me this is a possible career a lot of students “flirt” with when they are first considering careers (I did, D2 did also). But for various reasons, few end up actually going down that path.</p>
<p>When D2 was considering majors she took the College Board’s “Book of Majors” and read about every major. She “stickied” the ones she found interesting. Architecture got a sticky – but after carefully reading the book, so did 11 other majors. And there were actually clusters in a couple of other areas (a few related majors). Architecture was an outlier, and at that point only offered at two schools on her original list. We had a serious chat about this and whether she might actually want to pursue. I have no illusions that my kids will probably stick with their original major plans (I think most do not, although D1 did… too soon to tell for D2). But if she really thought it was important, I figured she would need at least some colleges on her list that offered it. She acknowledged when we talked that while architecture sounded like a kind of cool & sexy profession, and she enjoyed drawing buildings in art (she is very good at art, probably will have a secondary concentration in it) and drawing floorplans for fun. But her knowledge of the career was pretty superficial, and she didn’t want to jigger her college list just for that. She did not end up applying to either of the schools that offered architecture in the end.</p>
<p>My advice to you is to delver more deeply into architecture as a career if you really plan to limit your college search because of this major. See if you can figure out a way to shadow someone. I have no idea if there are any summer programs related to architecture (must admit I have not heard of any…) but doing something related to it would be useful to figure out what the job is really like and if you even have the temperament and skills for it. Maybe find some people online to chat with (through the CC architecture forum?). Read everything on that forum. And go through the College Board Book of Majors yourself (see you GC or try to get one through the library) – read about ALL the majors and give some serious thought to this. There are more different jobs in the world than the average 17 year old can possibly imagine. Just be careful that you don’t let a “dream major” limit your college search without very good cause.</p>
<p>Usually I think it is fine for a student to have a vague idea of majors and try a couple of things when they get to college, then figure out what fits best in conjunction with the classes and time spent in the career office at college understanding jobs & trends for careers in that area. But if your possible major is limiting your college list, I would say you should be doing more of that legwork ahead of time if possible.</p>
<p>OP, you should take a look at Iowa State. It has one of the best undergraduate architecture programs in the country and is known to be reasonable for out-of-state students, especially women.</p>
<p>How to convince your DAD!? Well it sounds like you have your mom convinced as she is taking you on this trip east to look at schools. Why don’t you wait until you get back…and then your mom might be able to help you!</p>
<p>DH says…there are WAY too many architects. He would not recommend this as a career right now.</p>
<p>As someone who was interested in Architecture in high school I have a little different take on how to approach an interest in Architecture. Given there are 3000+ colleges out there including Architecture as a possible major helps tremendously trying to make a reasonably short school list. Investigating your superset of possible majors may yield a very reasonable set if schools for you. In my case eons ago my possibility list shrunk to about 10 schools very quickly (I was interested in Architecture, Physics, Math, Computer Science, and Engineering).</p>
<p>While some schools likely have all the majors in which you are interested the Architecture likely sits alone at these schools. Similar to Intparent’s child I ultimately decided to not start in Architacture because of this separation … it was relatively easy to switch among all the other majors other than Architecture. If I started in Architecture and switched I would have to essentially start all over. As I investigated more I also realized I was likely not a good fit. While in high school I had scaled plans to redesign our house and parts of my high school … interesting, Architecture school did NOT want to see these plans … what they wanted to see was creative art work … since I have no artistic ability this seemed to indicate Architecture was not for me. In hindsight Architectural Engineering was probably the field I should have investigated … that might have been a better fit for this non-artistic geek.</p>
<p>PS - There is time to move your parents about going to school far from home … you have until May 1st. Frankly, you do not even need their OK to apply … you can do that yourself (and pay yourself). For now, as others has suggested, apply to a range of schools including both those that interest you and your parents.</p>
<p>Wellesley and Smith offer the same kind of undergraduate architecture major that Yale does, i.e. a liberal arts program that is not accredited by the professional body. So Yale might not be the best choice anyway for this student if he/she is really committed to architecture as a working profession.</p>
<p>The OP is a junior, right? So has until essentially Dec/Jan (when most RD apps are due) to convince them. I certainly agree that her best ally in this whole thing is her mom! Moms can often convince dads when no one else can!</p>
<p>One of the young women who worked part-time in my office during college was a Barnard architecture major. She said it was easier to be one at Barnard than Columbia.</p>
<p>Just to counter all of this gloom, the only kid I know from S’s HS class who majored in architecture as an undergraduate is WORKING as an architect and has been ever since graduation: first at a prestigious foreign firm, now in Manhattan. He went to U Penn.</p>
<p>Many of the business majors were unemployed or underemployed after graduating.</p>
<p>BTW, what ever happened to the idea of studying architecture in grad school? I always had the impression that that was the more common route.</p>
<p>From what I understand, there is a difference between a B.A. and a B.S. in Architecture. A B.A. does not qualify you to practice as an architect immediately after undergrad, so if you want to work as a licensed architect, you would need to go to graduate school. The other, a B.S., does qualify you to work immediately after undergrad.</p>
<p>Wellesley used to have two architecture tracks, a B.A. under the aegis of the Department of Art and a B.S., the latter in conjunction with MIT requiring significant coursework there beginning in the sophomore year. I’m not sure if they still do this.</p>
<p>"The OP has a desire to expand her wings. "
-if he is financially supporting himself, then there is no issue.
-if parents are paying, nobody in a world would pay for something that they do not want to pay for. I would not, convincing me or not would be completely irrelevant. Just a waste of time. We are talking about huge amount of $$$, we are not talking about few thousands. Anybody here would be willing to pay few hundred thousands for something that they truly do not want to pay? For many this amount of money is beyond their life time savings.<br>
If one wants to have something, then the only way to get it is to pay out of your own pocket (STUDENT LOANS). It is simply not fair at all to force somebody else to shed huge funds for undesirable product/service/whatever.</p>
