I need help with college selections and visits

College Search & Selection
1

Hello everyone,
I made a post like this before but I guess I didn’t put enough relevant information and I also have new questions. First of all, I want to visit the Clairmont Colleges (Harvey Mudd, Pitzer, Clairemont McKenna, Pomona) and other colleges like UCLA and USC but I have no idea what I’m going to do there or if I need to schedule a guided tour for all of them. Is there a lot of benefits to guided tours? I want to go to these places and explore them on my own as well so I am not sure what to do or how to schedule it.

Next, I am having some trouble with deciding colleges. If it helps, I am an Korean male with a 3.70 UW/ 4.20 W GPA, and I got a 1510 on the SAT and 770 on SAT Math 2. My ECs include being in an out of school orchestra for 4 years, being Quizbowl Vice President, Academic League Vice President, and Varsity Badminton Co Captain. I want to major in either Math or Computer Science, but there seems to be an issue here. I want to do something computer science related in my career, but getting into a good college going into computer science is much harder (I heard). My academic statistics are not that great and my chances do not look that good. I also heard compsci includes lots of physics, and I am extremely bad at not just physics, but all sciences (chem+bio). The other choice, math, I picked because I am pretty good at math, as I took Calculus AB and BC with no problem and I’m not super bored with the subject. Personally, I don’t really care about the location of the college or cost, but I do care about the rank. Is there anywhere that might be a good college to apply based on my academic statistics?

To those who reply and may have extra questions, I’ll try to reply to those, and thanks in advance for the help.

2

Does your school give you access to the Naviance site? If not, you can pay a fee to find schools that match your stats and you can look up rankings online.

In terms of what you do on college visits, it’s pretty easy. You want to make sure you like the environment and that decision can be based on any number of criteria as long as those are what matter to you. You might care about dorms and food or you might care about the quality of the computer lab or the hours of the libraries or the social scene… really, anything that matters to you is a good thing to check out. Attend classes if possible. I anticipate that you will probably say nothing really matters to you other than school rank but that kind of single-mindedness won’t serve you well. Schools want applicants who want what they have to offer and who will be assets to the school community, so learning about the differences between schools and figuring out where you fit as a person (and not just as a set of stats) is an important part of admissions strategy.