<p>Not including Cornell–haha. Why is that? Or do you really think you can’t get accepted?</p>
<p>I think–just in case–you should pick a Safety. I think a perfect Safety for a kid with a list like yours is to just pick their state school as a safety. Its a nice education in most cases, its cheap, and you might even be able to get a few dollars in additional merit-based scholarship money to go there.</p>
<p>You could pick something else as a Safety, but pick a school you’ll decently enjoy–even if it might not be your first choice.</p>
<p>^nonimagination
PSAT:210
Never took SAT1, but aiming for 2300 in June.
SAT2: 800,800,790
AP:5,5,5,5,5 I’m taking a couple more ap exams this year.
GPA: 3.8</p>
<p>^MSauce
I want to pick a safety where I will be happy to attend, I just really don’t feel like going to UT-Austin.</p>
<p>^Morrismm
Cornell is a little too big for me.</p>
<p>UT Austin is an outstanding school for math. It’s probably too big to make a good safety for you, but I just couldn’t resist saying that.</p>
<p>It’s tough to find schools that are small, top-notch in math, and less selective. Tech schools might be your best bet. Look at New Mexico Tech, Michigan Tech, and Colorado School of Mines.</p>
<p>You’re stats are great. I would assume you are an intelligent person. I would also assume that you therefore realize the statistical probability of being admitted into the individual schools you indicated had caught your interest.</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>Apply to a safety school or two. If nothing else, you’ll have a guaranteed merit scholarship.</p>
<p>Any specific suggestions?</p>
<p>My current list includes: Ivies (excluding Cornell), Stanford, MIT, Caltech, UChicago, Williams, Wash U, Rice and Duke.</p>
<p>So what schools on my least have the worst combination of math and IR program?</p>
<p>I doubt Caltech has much of an IR program.</p>
<p>Great Math department though.</p>
<p>Of the schools on your list, don’t drop Chicago because it is probably the least selective (although that may be changing … plus their criteria are a little quirky so odd results could occur). But, it is arguably the best of these schools for theoretical mathematics. Right up there with Harvard and Princeton, anyway. For IR, Chicago was ranked #7 for undergraduate programs and #6 for PhD programs by Foreign Policy magazine in 2009. Chicago also is very strong in public policy, finance, languages and civilization studies. As you’ve observed, they have an EA application option. </p>
<p>For a match school, have you considered NYU? Very strong in applied mathematics. Dunno about IR, but the NYC location should be a big plus. I think you are short-sighted, too, for not giving UT more of a chance.</p>
<p>A little outside the box, for another match school, would be Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. Koffi Annan (former UN Sec Gen) went there and they are known for attracting many international students. Their math dept looks interesting. It’s a small school but unlike most LACs is in a big city (albeit a butt-freezing cold one).</p>
<p>We don’t know the rest of your stats to assess reach vs. match. I’m going to assume that you have top notch stats because otherwise, your list is way too reach heavy. If you’re not a top candidate, it is a very realistic possibility that you get rejected by all of them. </p>
<p>With that assumption, I think that your reach list is well thought out so far. I would try to pare down the list of reaches and add some matches and think about safeties a little. A school like Harvey Mudd sounds like a match for you (between 40-90% chance of admission), so I’d think pretty hard about it. People are right. Claremont is really one mid-size campus with 5 colleges. I like the fact that you are applying to 3 schools EA, because if you bag one, you have a safety and if you don’t you still have time to find one. Reed is also a great math school, a match plus it has a Jan 15th deadline. </p>
<p>For your list of 15 schools, try to estimate the probability that you will actually attend each one. For example, for the school that you would rank 15th in preference, what is the probability that you will get rejected from the other 14 AND get into the 15th. I suspect that it is infinitesimal. Good applications are a lot of work, so you have to optimize. I think that you have too many. You have time to pare down the list before Jan 1. You’ve gotten a bunch of good suggestions for matches here. I might focus on the ones that have Jan 15th deadlines like Reed, St. Olaf, Macalester, or Brandeis. If you wanted to add matches that have Jan 1 deadlines, Northwestern, NYU or Rochester come to mind. Rochester is probably a safety, but they seem to care about “level of interest”, and you wouldn’t have time to show it. </p>
<p>As for safeties, there are a bunch of schools with 30 minute quickie applications and are primarily numbers based (Canada is 100% numbers based). I don’t know about UT-Austin, but Wisconsin, Ohio State Honors College, McGill, Toronto and Waterloo (in Canada) all have trivial applications and all are safeties. They are all big however. Yeah, I know that you won’t be happy attending your safety, but you would be even more unhappy attending nowhere when you could have invested 30 minutes. The US ones have priority deadlines before you hear about your EA decisions, so unless you want to rely on the Canadian ones, just pick one. My D applied to Wisconsin as her safety in September and heard in October. McGill has a Jan 15 deadline, Toronto and Waterloo both have March 1 deadlines. If you want to use Canada as your safety, you can just focus on your reaches until you know that you need a safety. </p>
<p>Good luck.</p>
<p>Sorry I missed your stats above. Until you have the 2300, you’d better explore contingencies. The 3.8 will be evaluated in the context of your school. If that’s #1, great, but if not even in the top 10%, then you are being way too aggressive. The rest is indeed impressive.</p>
<p>Bestwinner, although public and much larger than 10,000 students, I think you should check out Michigan. Its Mathematics department is ranked among the top 10 nationally and is actually small. Furthermore, the Honors Mathematics sequence is concidered one of the best of its kind. </p>
<p>Finally, Michigan’s Political Science department is ranked among the top 2 or 3 in the nation, although that department tends to attract many students.</p>