<p>"As a general rule of thumb, try to think of reach-match-safety this way:</p>
<p>Unrealistic reach - schools where your test scores, GPA, etc. are below the 25% median, regardless of how many students they accept </p>
<p>Realistic reach - schools where you are in the lower half of the 25-75 percentile medians OR where the percentage of students accepted fall below 30%. No matter WHAT your stats are, these are reaches for everyone.</p>
<p>Maybe schools (or matches) - these are schools where your stats fall in the upper 25-75 percentile but accept more than 30% of applicants.</p>
<p>Safeties - schools where your stats fall above the 75% or schools where you are in the 50-75% but the school accepts well over 60% of students."</p>
<p>The one thing I have to say to this is that you shouldn't focus on acceptance rates so much. Many strong schools have higher acceptance rates because the pool of applicants is very self-selected, and only top students apply anyways. The profile of incoming students is a much better gauge of where you would be. </p>
<p>As a general recommendation, I would suggest visiting a wide variety of schools just to get a sense of what you're looking for. You may have something in mind and find that it is not exactly what you want once you see it. Fill out this: <a href="http://apps.collegeboard.com/search/adv_typeofschool.jsp%5B/url%5D">http://apps.collegeboard.com/search/adv_typeofschool.jsp</a> and then look at the results. I would suggest based on my experience with it that you shouldn't fill out the selectivity part or the part about the average high school gpa, because it eliminates schools it shouldn't.<br>
good luck!</p>