How to deal with going to you safety school?

College Search & Selection
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<p>Have you sat down with your parents to run the EFC calculators at [FinAid</a>! Financial Aid, College Scholarships and Student Loans](<a href=“http://www.finaid.org%5DFinAid”>http://www.finaid.org) and [College</a> Calculators - savings calculators - college costs, loans](<a href=“College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools”>Calculate Your Cost – BigFuture | College Board) ? Are you likely to qualify for a Pell or subsidized Stafford? If so, have you investigated Questbridge? </p>

<p>You may want to spend some time in the Financial Aid Forum to find out which colleges and universities are likely to have money for someone with your GPA and test scores. You could start out here: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/848226-important-links-automatic-guaranteed-merit-scholarships.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/848226-important-links-automatic-guaranteed-merit-scholarships.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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No, UM stand for University of Miami. Sorry I wasn’t more clear. I hear different things with their fin-aid, but I could use my Bright Futures.</p>

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I’ve looked seriously at about 25-30 schools. The ones on my list are what I think are the best combo of fin-aid, science departments, living situations, etc. Tufts is on my list, I haven’t heard anything fantastic about JH or Washington and Lee’s fin aid, and William and Mary’s fin aid is really only good for in-state’s. </p>

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I’ve ran two but I can’t remember which. Both my parents EFCs were 0 (they’re divorced) and mine was the minimum of like 1,500 or something around that. And I know I qualify for Pell since my sister has one but I’m not sure about Stafford and I don’t know what questbridge is.</p>

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<p>Chill out. Most schools out of state wouldn’t give you much for national merit (maybe only like 2K max). But these schools will give you great aid. You are a junior–start pumping up your extracurriculars and start focusing on your SAT. Work hard, and you will do great. Don’t just graduate early. Trust me on this. There are plenty, I mean plenty, of people who aren’t national merit finalists (and the scores differ from state to state for that matter). So don’t worry. Best of luck!</p>

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the schools you are targeting don’t care about the GPA as defined by your high school. They review your HIGH SCHOOL transcript class by class, year by year. They recompute your GPA in a format that makes sense to them. They will not count 8th grade at all, and won’t give 9th grade a lot of attention. It’s all about showing you learned the fundamentals by performing well in 10th grade, especially 11th grade, and sometimes, first semester of 12th grade as well. 9th and 8th grade are pretty irrelevant to an adcom.</p>