<p>Hanae, You're welcome. Just to be clear: the portfolio IS slides (or in a few cases a DVD). Colleges don't evaluate actual artwork unless you make a specific appointment with a professor to do so.</p>
<p>Once you have a couple of dozen good slides it's fairly easy to duplicate them. By the time you apply a year from now your list will have expanded and contracted several times. You should end up with 8-12 applications.</p>
<p>As far as safeties go, I don't want to make too fine a point of whether a school is a safe-match or a matchy-safety but I think if you characterize yourself as an Asian/female in sciences/artist you will have a good shot at Skidmore, Hamilton, Conn College, Kenyon and Smith. </p>
<p>If you don't want to go to to UMass (or any other college) it is not a true safety. Accept that you'll need to spend a lot of time visiting and researching safeties; they are out there but it's a process of elimination. Try to find schools where Asians are not over-represented.</p>
<p>Also, will you need financial aid -- either needbased or merit? This is a factor that may affect your list as well.</p>