<p>Are you considering U Maryland College Park? It is a big school in an urbanized suburb of DC but it has a very nice campus, great math department, and excellent engineering. You would get in-state tuition.</p>
<p>Johns Hopkins would be good but I think their BME program is very selective.</p>
<p>At which university does your father teach?</p>
<p>Retake the SATs as many times as you can stand it.</p>
<p>How did you learn SAS programming? How did you learn statistics? Those are great skills to have as a high school student. Very unusual. You should continue to develop them. And, mention them in your college application somewhere.</p>
<p>As everyone says overall you are in great shape. First many colleges give much more emphasis on GPA than on SAT. Second with time your English will improve. Third with practice on standardized tests your scores will improve. (FWIW my daughter with a lifetime in the US had a PSAT of 185, and an SAT of 2050.) Check to see if your school has an SAT prep program. Fourth, you have an alternative to the SAT in the ACT. Scores in the ACT can be very different from the SAT. (FWIW my daughter scored in the top 10% in SAT, top 2% in ACT) Fifth, if your weakness in the SAT is confined to the English portion, your international background gives colleges a very good reason to cut you some slack. Finally, a lot of the better schools also focus on ECs and yours are shaping up very well.</p>
<p>That said you will have to make trade offs if you want to have significant financial aid. The best known private schools often have strong endowments that let them give significant need based aid, but they have their own methods of calculating need and there may be a significant gap between what they think is your need, and what your family thinks is your need, and such schools rarely, if ever, give significant supplemental merit aid. Less well known and public schools have more limited aid available, but focussed on student merits. Many of them will love you. Check out some reach (financial aid) and safety (merit aid) schools of interest and see if they have a financial aid calculator in their web pages to see what you come up with.</p>
<p>Some schools I would look at with your interests: MIT (Why not reach high), Caltech (although I am skeptical that you are their type), Harvey Mudd, RPI (they need girls in engineering and they've gotten some good endowments recently), Cornell (other than bein large it meets your criteria), Tufts, JHU, U Rochester (I like what I read about them), CMU, Case Western, Virginia Tech (a little large and south of you but a vary good school), UVA (about the right size and you will love Charlottesville, but it is south of you and the engineering program is not quite as strong as Virginia Tech though the rest of the school is stronger), Delaware, LeHigh, Bucknell, Trinity College, ... Spend a couple hours each weekend surfing college web pages. Visit some nearby schools to get a better feel for what you like.</p>
<p>Pay a lot of attention to finances. If your father is working as a professor, you probably do not qualify for much need based aid. Merit awards are usually small-it is very difficult to find any over $15K. You may be able to attend the school that your father teaches at free of charge, or exchange that free tuition for up to $27K at another school. There is a group of nearly 400 schools that exchange tuitions for employees. However, most of them are small liberal arts schools. Smith, George Washington U, and University of Delaware are on the list- they may be good for you. Realistically, University of Maryland is well ranked, and has a lot of honors programs that you should be eligible for. It is a good base choice. You can apply to and get into a lot of private schools, but then finances will be the issue. Financial aid is pretty unpredictable. You just have to apply at a number of schools and then see what happens.</p>
<p>Don't you still have one more year to go? Stop worrying so much. Believe me, there are tons of students in your situation who have parents that dont know much about schools.</p>
<p>In California, you might want to check out two of the Claremont colleges: Scripps and Harvey Mudd. Scripps is a women's college and Harvey Mudd is focused on math, science, and engineering. While both are small, they are part of a 5-college consortium of about 5,000 students, so you are effectively part of this larger community and can take classes and do activities across colleges. All the Claremont colleges meet 100% of demonstrated need. Scripps has merit scholarships - but pay attention to the early deadline for applying. Harvey Mudd also has merit scholarships, but those are based only on scores and grades.</p>
<p>It will help your application to most schools if you make contact with the admission office, so you can get on their radar and let them get to know you a bit before they see your application. You can do this by attending one of their traveling events (check the admission office's schedule of where their representatives will be) or you can just call and ask to speak to the admission rep who works in your geographic area, and have a few questions ready to ask.</p>
<p>from another russian-math-sciency-languagy girl... relax!
Here are some ideas:
1. for the critical reading, work books are great
2. research colleges on the internet
3. definetly apply to some with merit aid
4. continue doing activities you love..</p>