<p>Oh, wait, I didn’t mean to be blunt (except about the physics), or to make you feel like a lackluster applicant. Let me try to be clearer.</p>
<p>I don’t think any of the colleges on your list will look at your application and say, “What the hell? This ruthism person had no business applying here!” These schools enroll students with credentials like yours. You absolutely should apply if they interest you. The problem you’ll have, as I think you probably know, is numbers: these colleges and universities have enough applicants to fill their freshman dorms several times over with very smart, very motivated, very well prepared students. You do seem to be all of those things. It’s just that being all of those things isn’t quite as unusual as a lot of people (your grandparents, the kids at school who think you’re “a genius,” some lady in your mom’s spin class…) seem to think.</p>
<p>“How can I stand out in the applicant pool?” is a very hard question. Probably unanswerable, really. For the most part, if you’re going to stand out, you already know it. You’ve noticed that you’re one of the most sought-after high-school linebackers in Texas, or that you were in a Broadway show and two national tours, or that you’re Chelsea Clinton. (OK, Chelsea already went to college, but you get the idea.) For most of us mortals, the best we can do is to do the best we can, and hope the numbers break our way somewhere.</p>
<p>Everything you’ve done is good. Your transcript and your SAT scores make you look highly competitive; you’ve shown real interest, talent and commitment in the literary arts. Depending on the circumstances of the publication of your volume of poetry, that really might catch somebody’s eye. (Did you self-publish? If so, that’s good. Did a real publisher publish it? That’s better.)</p>
<p>Finding safeties can be hard. Often, you can do that by looking for colleges or universities that live a little bit in the shadow of the places that make your tingle with anticipation. You really want to go to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, but don’t know whether you can get in? The Elliott School of International Affairs at GW and the School of International Service at American U. are good alternatives, too. In your case, you have a strong literary bent. Maybe you want to look at colleges with highly respected literary reviews. Kenyon College and the University of the South at Sewanee both have well regarded literary reviews; they’re well respected institutions, but easier to get into than Columbia, Amherst or Georgetown. University of Iowa is well known for its excellent creative writing programs, but not as selective as Tufts or Brown.</p>
<p>It’s none of my business, of course, but I really like to see high school kids find good safeties. Because, as fabulous and exciting as those really famous colleges are, admission to them is fundamentally unpredictable. And, as dismissive as some posters on College Confidential can be about “second-tier” or “third-tier” institutions, some of them are really vibrant, exciting places where you can have a life-changing intellectual experience. My own daughter is enrolling at a university we all thought was her safety, but after she visited it more than once, and really looked at its course offerings and its campus atmosphere, she really liked it.</p>
<p>And, of course, there’s the money thing. If you’re paying retail at some of the institutions you’ve named, that bill is going to come to about a quarter of a million after-tax dollars. Some parents have that kind of money saved up for their kids, but many don’t. If you’re counting on financial aid to pay the bills (and I’m still not asking), then you really can’t just be playing the long shots.</p>
<p>Really, I do apologize if I seemed to be discouraging you from applying to those places. That wasn’t my intention. You look like a legitimate contender at any of them, and going to any of them could be a phenomenal experience. But I hope you’ll hedge your bets a little bit, too. Every spring there are a few posters on College Confidential who applied to a bunch of reach schools figuring that surely something would come through, but nothing did, and now they’re crushed because they had “safeties” that they hated, or worse, no safety at all. It’s a terrible story…every time it happens. Just don’t be one of those kids.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>[EDIT: x-post with prefect. Thanks for getting in there, prefect. Obviously, you understood me perfectly. It just took a darn lot of time to type all that out, and I had a phone call in the middle of it, too.]</p>