Hi, I’ll be applying at the end of 2018, so I’m currently in the process of making lists and doing research. One thing I keep hearing people say is to find out which schools are the right fit for me. One way they say you should do this is to visit the colleges and get a feel for the place, talk to current students and see if they are people you’d like as friends, or people in whom you see yourself. Well, that’s all well and good if you can visit campuses, but I live in India, and I don’t know how many colleges in US I can visit before I apply. I’ve been too Stanford, Berkeley, Reed College, Penn and Princeton last year, but mostly time pressed visits and didn’t really get too interact with students except at Reed.
I know what I’ll like with regards to location: urban/suburban, mostly not down South except maybe Fl or TX.
I know I definitely need to be in a liberal environment. (Or at least, definitely NOT in a conservative environment.)
But that’s it, really. So, how, without visiting anywhere, do I find out which colleges will be a good fit for me?
You’re on your way to defining fit and that’s good.
Other things to consider with ‘fit’ are sports, parties, intensity, flexibility, clubs
Sports culture - if a college has good to great sports teams and everyone goes to the games, it can be pretty isolating if you don’t care for sports.
Party culture - sometimes if a college is in a city it can be hard to find parties on a weekend because everyone scatters (Harvard is notorious for this). If you don’t like big noisy crowded parties, it can be tough if there are raging keggers in all the dorms on weekends (many large state schools).
Intensity - some schools are notorious for being super-competitive with curve grading and a stress culture, some schools emphasize collaboration and have ways to ease you into the expected workload.
Flexibility - the classic two ends of the spectrum here are Columbia (with a good 1/3 of the courses you take mandated by their general curriculum requirements) and Brown (if you want to take all English classes for four years, go ahead!)
You won’t just be going to classes for four years, you are going to have free times. A student club can be a great way to fill that free time and find other people who love the same things that you do. You can search a school’s club database to see what sort of things the students do in their spare time. If there are clubs dedicated to dancing a style of dance that you’re good at or cooking a type of food that you love or watching a TV show that you’ve seen every episode, you’ll know that your people are there and you have a start at finding a group of potential best friends. If there is a club sport that you enjoy playing even if you’re bad at it, there’s another great group of friends.
You’re going to college to get educated, sure, but what you really want is a place to be happy and to belong. ‘Fit’ is a shorthand way of saying ‘there are people who I might like and who might like me and I have a good chance to be happy’.
Fit must also include affordability and suitable academics.
Congratulations on your hard work and success!
I read your other thread, and you had some good advice there.
Yes, it’s harder if you can’t visit schools. Still, you seem healthily self aware and have a good idea of what you like. That goes a long way. Find some, like Reed, you like and then find some similar schools.
In terms of chances, I like to cite this example. We visited a tip-top LAC. They said 70% of applicants were fully qualified, and the school was confident they would successful academically and otherwise. At the time, it accepted 14%. So 4 in 5 fully qualified applicants (according to the school) were not accepted. You’d be qualified for Stanford AND can figure out how the numbers for Stanford, which probably accepts 1-2% of unhooked applicants (about a half dozen local students have attended Stanford in recent years, and all of them were national-level athletes, mostly swimmers).
With your accomplishments, you should certainly consider a few HYPS schools–including Barnard and Chicago–in case lightning strikes, but also some that are not so daunting in terms of admissions (and there are plenty of great ones). (Barnard is a women’s college but right by Columbia and very tied to it.)
Reed is great. Portland is terrific, and it’s an intellectual, liberal school.
You have Penn and UT-Austin connections. Both are very urban. Penn is more pre-professional. TX is obviously NOT liberal, but Austin is more so. I was there in the spring, and it seemed like a vibrant, diverse campus, and city. Obviously very large, and quite the opposite of Reed in that respect.
I agree that you might look at the Philly area schools in the Tri-College Consortium–Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore–to see if one might be a particularly good fit for you.
A few others, Oberlin and Macalester and Carleton. Oberlin is outside Cleveland, a better city than it’s reputation, and is liberal and intellectual. Macalester is in St. Paul, part of a large urban area, and has an international bent (and very cold). Carleton is in a smaller town (with St. Olaf) (also very cold), but is absolutely at tip-top LAC with an intellectual student body (fairly similar to Reed to a large degree, to my mind, and we visited Reed for a day, and a family member attended Carleton).
In Boston, maybe also look at Tufts University. Outstanding academics.
If you want more access to the outdoors, Colorado College is one of the few outstanding LACs in the West. It’s in Colorado Springs. Colorado is liberal, Colorado Springs is notably conservative, and Colorado College is liberal–if you can figure that out (perplexing to me). The Colorado Front Range–soaring mountains and skiing–are right there. One notable thing about Colorado College–students take one intense class at a time, which is unique.
Read financial aid info carefully. If you think you would qualify for need-based financial aid, then apply. If you are sure not, then my advice would be to say you are not applying. This is debatable, but if a school is need aware, and you are not asking for need-based aid, it could well be helpful. You just want to research carefully each school’s policy. In many cases, all students are considered for merit aid, though it can be complicated.
Good luck!