<p>I am in need of help as you can tell by the title.</p>
<p>My situation: I have good stats but I don't know what place I can afford. My parents make a good sum of money (they probably bring in 200K+ each year), but they said if I want to go to medical school (which is most likely going to cost around 75K each year), they will only pay 320K. This means if they were to pay out my complete medical school, I would only have 20K to pay for undergrad, or I will have to borrow money through loans, which is tough on a 25-27 year old who will be doing residency for the next X amount of years. This means a lot of my dream colleges like NYU and Columbia are now pointless to apply to since I probably will receive 0 FA. The only colleges I could go to for free is the CUNY, considering I get into the Macaulay Honors college and stay with my parents in NYC, but that's not really the college experience I imagined in 10th and 11th grade. I could go to OOS public schools and try to get good scholarship, but I really don't want to leave the east, because we all know the east coast is the best coast, and I have 0 family there.</p>
<p>So please give me some recommendations for schools to go to outside the CUNYs that I could afford?</p>
<p>My Stats: </p>
<p>SAT: 2250 (800 M, 710 R, 740 W)
ACT: 34 (34 E, 35 M, 34 R, 34 S)
GPA: 4.0/4.0 UW
Class Rank: not sure but definitely top 5%
AP Classes: Took 12 AP Classes; Tested on 5 and will test on 3 more
AP Bio: 4
AP Calc AB: 5
AP Lang: 4
AP Stats: 4
AP US History: 5
AP Chem: Will take
AP Psychology: Will Take
AP Lit: Will Take</p>
<p>EC's: In about 12 school clubs, leadersin 3 of them, and have about 500 hours of volunteering under my belt with 60 hours of doctor shadowing</p>
<p>Awards: Have several school awards, and 2 state awards, and the AP award </p>
<p>You could benefit from some time away from home. Every year we get posts from kids who are away for the first time and miss their parents, bratty brothers, great aunts, and pet goldfish. Can you find a camp or live-away summer program, or even a job at the shore?</p>
<p>@Wordworker I want to go to college near home, but I don’t want my college experience to mimic high school like it would if I just went to the CUNYs. </p>
<p>No point in paying 60K a year at undergrad and then paying 75K a year at medical school. Just go to a good school, where you can get a good GPA, have enough time to study for the MCAT, and where you can save money. The CUNYs seem just right for those purposes. If you want to stay in a dorm and have a “real” college experience, you can go to Hofstra U, where you will most likely get a full tuition scholarship. There is also Rutgers. You could also try to get the full-ride at Fordham</p>
<p>But if I were you, I would just stick with the CUNYs. If you get into the Honors College (which you most likely will), you get to have family support, get a free computer, free tuition, get to go to any museums in the city for free, and just get to chill. </p>
<p>You could get some excellent merit aid at some colleges in the south like Alabama. Go to the Financial Aid forum and look at the pinned threads for some options.</p>
<p>How about looking at the SUNYs? A little more expensive than CUNY but not that much and you’d get the dorm life/away from home more typical college environment. Binghamton, Albany, and Stony Brook all fit your needs I think, there’s also the state schools at Cornell and Geneseo was big in sciences a few years ago, not so sure now.</p>
<p>Definitely look at the SUNYs. UB probably has the best scholarship opportunities for freshmen. I think you should be able to get great merit aid at a lot of schools. Talk to your guidance department.</p>
<p>First of all, you have extremely generous parents, and I hope you recognize that. They are NOT putting you in any hardship! It is very hard to offer a child 320K when you’ve probably only begun making $200K/yr. </p>
<p>Secondly, forget about med school for the moment and think about how you want to spend the 320K. Common sense says that you spend the money on your undergraduate experience so that you leave u/g with no debt because a) it is always better to postpone debt than to stretch it out over a longer period of time and b) you don’t know if you’ll even go to med school or any professional school after you graduate. You could use the remaining money, assuming that your parents make it available to you, as a down payment on a house or an investment in a life of several years of charity.</p>
<p>Thirdly, if you reduce your costs at the u/g level, which you can certainly do in a number of ways given your stats, you can save your parents’ generosity for postgraduate life (see above). Your stats will allow you to go to a lot of great colleges, but they will also allow you to go to college for a lot less money than the greatest colleges will cost you (given that you won’t get anything but pennies in need-based aid). There are colleges that will give you automatic full tuition, maybe full rides, or there are colleges that will cost you less than 20K/yr. </p>
<p>Fourthly, you can go to any 4yr college in the US and still get into med school. Med schools won’t give a toot where you go to school as long as you take the prereqs, get a high GPA, score well on the MCATs, interview well, and do some research that gets you letters of rec.</p>
<p>Some of your first big adult decisions. Choose wisely. </p>
<p>Also look for colleges that will give you credit for the AP Classes… although if you are pre-med you have the choice of taking Bio/CHem again or taking an advanced version of those (but make sure to get A’s!)</p>
<p>Look for schools where you’ll get merit aid for your stats. You’d have a shot at half tuition at Dickinson, I think. What about St Lawrence, Wheaton, or Rhodes?
In addition, you have all the competitive and automatic merit schools (pinned thread in the financial aid forum). Pitt would be a good school if you wanted to try and save money while living in a big city (you’d get into the Honors College and would have a very good shot at a merit scholarship).
320k is HUGE chunk of money. Be very grateful to your parents. It’s really amazing they can spend that much on your education.
Now, if you use 40k each year for college, and graduate in 4 years, you still have 160k for med school… 40K + merit scholarship + 5.5k loan + work study = you can pretty much attend anywhere.
You could also do the SciencesPo/Columbia program, since I think you’d only pay about 20k for the first two years. You’d need to speak French and you’d need to take all your science courses during your last two years though (since the Sciences Po program involves polisci, economics, etc; note that you can major in anything you want as a premed. GPA and science GPAs are all that matters, so choosing the best major for you is key.)
Don’t think about medical school for now. You don’t know yet that’s where you’ll be going. Use part of the money to get to the best school for you (not necessarily the most prestigious) and remember that if you attend a decent college you can attend med school (keeping in mind most freshmen change their minds in the first place, and then only half get into even one med school, so that you should choose your major and undergrad college carefully, not just for hypothetical savings kept for med school.)
You can also apply to a Macaulay-partner college that has housing, BTW, such as CCNY, although if you live in NYC in a decent neighborhood it probably wouldn’t be the bes use of these facilities.</p>