@CValle Here is a strategy that worked for us to greatly minimize the number of applications and (IMO) maximize results.
We spent a lot of time looking for one satisfactory safety that offered an early decision in the fall, which was much harder than finding a first-choice/dream school. My daughter applied to University of Minnesota, which has rolling admissions. The application was free and took about 30 minutes to complete. She had an acceptance letter in hand in about three weeks. My son chose Lawrence University, which offered a non-binding early acceptance in the fall.
Next, we focused efforts on applying early to one first-choice/dream school. I tried to steer them toward schools that were in their strikes zones. Schools where their stats were at least well within the middle 50% of the accepted class. Schools where their Naviance dot was at least safely within the cluster; not a lagging outlier. For example: My daughter really liked Juilliard, but I felt it was too much of a long shot; likewise with my son and Stanford. I told them I would support whatever they decided, but gently encouraged them to spend their limited and valuable time looking elsewhere.
Once they selected a top choice (daughter-Brown and son-Haverford), they each spent a LOT of time working on that one application. I felt it was helpful that they took the time needed to make a strong, concise, well-written, elegant case (shown, not told) that they would be a great fit to that unique school. During this period they also spent a minimal amount of time submitting a couple of apps to target schools - Daughter: UNC/Chapel Hill and Fordham, and son at UNC/Chapel Hill and Georgia Tech.
Had they not been admitted when early decisions came out on Nov. 15th, they each were ready to apply to a short list of reach schools. They would have had 45 days with long holiday breaks; while already having their safety acceptances in hand.
“Had they not been admitted when early decisions came out on Nov. 15th, they each were ready to apply to a short list of reach schools”
My kids followed a similar approach to yours, @arwarw. One got in ED and one did not and had to work hard on apps over the holiday break. One correction to your post, though is that ED decisions don’t come out on 11/15, more like 12/15 or a little later for colleges like Brown and Haverford. So, the window left to work on applications is much, much shorter than 45 days.
Trimming the list is always harder than finding more unis to add. At some point you and your D will just have to come up with which factors are most important and go from there. I am sure there was a reason why she put all those schools on the list .I happened to choose metropolitan and NE, two of her criteria and even then WashU is midwest and metropolitan is in the eyes of the beholder…I almost added that one. But she could choose BA/MD program over all else or some other factor and come up with a different elimination list. Pretty much any top 50 college/uni these days, IMO is strong in sciences, attracts smart kids or studious serious kids and is “rigorous” and kids can only go to one.
I’d be very certain that my kid knew what she was getting in to (both in terms of curriculum and professional prospects) before encouraging the accelerated BA/MD route. I think a lot of kids have an unrealistic idea of what physicians do all day (thank you, TV); an equally unrealistic view of what medical or bio research is all about (don’t know who to blame that on), and assume that the hard part of the accelerated program is getting accepted.
Med school is a grind no matter how you end up there. It is the way one gets to become board certified in X (whatever X happens to be) and gets to see patients to do Y (whatever Y happens to be). It is a mostly inefficient way to do something else (big scale health reform, health policy, even run a big program for disease control or some other huge public health issue.) There are so many health careers right now-- and many kids assume that the first step is becoming a doc.
The cost of med school and the time commitment (and the foregone earnings while a young person is in med school) means that it is the right track for a kid who wants to become a physician. If there are other paths that right now seem exciting or compelling or attractive, I wouldn’t encourage my kid to do an accelerated program.
I know a LOT of former docs. Maybe @garland can weigh in here. But medicine is very different than it was when our cohort was getting out, the financial rewards for all those years of study are very different, and Life Sciences offers many attractive careers which don’t involve becoming a doctor first. (Big Data didn’t exist when we were in college and the idea of curing cancers at a cellular level was in its infancy).
If the accelerated program idea goes away it seems to me your D’s list quickly shapes up into something quite manageable.
My D and I used Parchment and Cappex to get their predictions of her chances for admission to colleges she was interested in. She answered the questions honestly on each website when constructing her profiles, and sure enough, she was accepted to all five of the colleges where the websites predicted a 50 percent or greater chance of admission for her.
Everyone has a different risk threshold for “reach” colleges. We agreed that it didn’t make sense to try and apply for colleges where she had a low predicted probability of acceptance.
FWIW, Cappex predicted an 82 percent chance of admission and Parchment predicted a range of approximately 58-68 percent chance of admission to her top choice college she ultimately enrolled in and is currently attending, which had an actual average admission rate of 31 percent.
I agree with the idea of first thinking about whether or not to base some applications on the idea of med school at all, let alone the BA/MD programs. As others have said, you can major in anything and go to med school and if prereq’s aren’t taken as an undergrad, there are many post-back programs that take care of that (see Goucher’s for instance). She has already changed interests. It is fine to go to college without knowing exactly what you want to study or do for a career, as you know and one thing to look at might be the number of gen eds and other requirements that can enhance breadth but also affect free choice for a kid who is self-directed.
To be ruthless, if med school is off the table for now and location is considered:
Reaches
Yale, MIT, Brown , Chicago
Matches
Barnard, Wellesley, and I would do Tufts not BU
Safety
GWU, Smith, a public U. with rolling admissions?
Or even more ruthless
Yale or Brown (they are quite different), Chicago
Barnard, Tufts
GWU, public U.
My kids also did the apply to two EA applications route. Older son actually got invited to apply to RPI early - based I think on PSAT scores and perhaps NYS location - he knew by Thanksgiving he was in and would get unspecified merit $$ which was nice. Younger son got into Chicago EA which meant he dropped one of his safeties from the list, he kept the other one because it was really strong in his probable major and he really liked it. (Merit $$ there too, which could have made a difference to many families.) I think it’s doable to apply to 6-8 reachy schools where you want to do a good job on the application and really put your all into the “Why this college?” essays and any other unique to that college question.
I would lean to Tufts over BU as well. It is however a reach school for nearly everyone. They care a lot about fit and she should make sure that she is a good fit for them. They care a lot about global citizenship and believe kids can start changing the world before they graduate. She should look at their website carefully and see what she thinks.
I don’t think anyone should rush into accelerated med programs unless they are very, very sure they want to be doctors.
I’m going to second @mommdc’s suggestion of Pitt. My D had a similar list and stats and urban requirement. Pitt is a great school with an Honor’s College. It also has a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in which the student has to write and defend a thesis to a multi-university faculty panel. It has rolling admissions and starts awarding merit aid in November. The initial application is quite simple with just 3 short answer questions. My D knew she was in with a FT scholarship by early November and was able to eliminate a few schools from her list including CWRU though she still applied to 15.
A few observations about your list:
Mt Holyoke is really isolated. It has a small cluster of shops near it but you have to take a bus to Amherst or Northampton to get to a small town. My D eliminated it but did apply to Smith. MHC does have a FT scholarship and Smith's tops out at 25K I believe though maybe it was raised to 30K.
-BU’s basic application isn’t much but if you apply to Honor’s and the Chancellor’s Scholarship then that makes it a much more time consuming app. The essays for the latter 2 take some time and thought.
-It’s a lot easier to get into Philly from Haverford/Bryn Mawr than from Swarthmore. TBH I’ve never tried to get to Swarthmore from Philly but I played volleyball this summer with 2 Swarthmore students that had internships in Philly Center City and they had rented a place in the city because it would have been too much trouble to commute in every day.
My D had the same desire for rigor but we had a more staunch merit requirement so Swarthmore, Wellesley, JHU (too few merit awards), Tufts were eliminated early. Initially she liked Yale but after visiting and researching more she applied to Princeton instead. Based on NPC's the Princeton FA was quite better than Yale's and she liked the research requirement at Princeton. It's not urban but she didn't like New Haven that much saying it seemed like all the bad urban aspects but very little of the good urban aspects.
-Drew is very much a suburban school. Not sure how easy it is to get to the city via PT.
I agree an early app to Pitt is an excellent idea. My D also had a FT scholarship by mid October, followed by an invitation to interview for R/B as well as the guaranteed medical school acceptance. She does not attend Pitt… but the honors program is top notch and it continues to be one of my favorite schools.
“It’s a lot easier to get into Philly from Haverford/Bryn Mawr than from Swarthmore.”
Haven’t done it myself but I honestly don’t think it is that dissimilar from any of the 3 colleges. Swarthmore Station is literally on the edge of campus, within walking distance.
I think the length of the list is not what you should be focusing on.
Instead, I think you should focus on how you are going to manage the early and regular waves of the process – ED, ED2, EA, SCEA, REA, etc. You need to do this in two stages. And you also really need to figure out what the very top target schools are.
If your kid is really focused on running with the big dogs and you really feel that money is no object ($275k full sticker fyi!!!), then you should be planning a strategy for using the early round of admissions – whether ED (NW, WUSTL, Brown) or SCEA (Yale) or EA (MIT) or ED2 (Chicago). And remember that you have to figure out how to comply with the rules of ALL schools.
MIT lets any kid apply EA. But if you want to go Yale SCEA, Yale would prohibit an MIT EA. Northwestern would let you apply ED and also MIT EA. But if you get accepted to NW your kid is bound and will be required to turn down or withdraw from MIT. And since NW fills 50% of its seats via ED, you really want to be playing ED rather than RD if NW really is the target.
Based on the feedback and results from the early wave, then you can much more easily know how many apps will be required in the RD round. If you strategically use your early options, you could be one and done by Dec 15. Or if the early results are not a hit, then you may need to do a dozen apps for the RD round. And you’ll also be sweating out the decisions until March 31 (not fun!).
I got a kick out of the “is Providence a CITY” issue. That was exactly my daughter’s concern when she applied to RISD. After admission there, she decided that Providence was definitely “enough of a real city,” but just as important to her was the ability to get to NYC by train or bus in 2-3 hours; she wasn’t enamored of Boston, which is about 1 hour away, and she had several friends and high school classmates who were attending Columbia and NYU. So NY was where she went to escape for a couple of days. She now lives and works in NYC.
Ha! @northwesty I assume your name has to do with the Pacific Northwest and not Northwestern since I know you would know it’s NU if it was your school! :))
First, there are now two NUs in the Big Ten. With Nebraska’s NU being the one that is much better known and recognized. Since Nebraska’s NU goes back to how many of the old Big 8 Conference schools reversed their school initials too – Univ of Colorado – CU, Univ of Kansas – KU, Univ of Oklahoma – OU, Univ of Missouri – MU.
Second, you realize that Northeastern goes by NU? And also Niagara? And that www.nu.edu doesn’t take you to a school in Evansville.
Really cries out for a new brand. I’m sure the professors at the highly ranked NWU/NW communications school would all agree how lame NU/Northwestern is.