Glitchy when tried to edit. National U means a top tier school known outside its region. This includes some/many flagship U’s and some private schools. Your own flagship may/may not take students at your level- you need to check with your HS GC.
@google12 To address your question about LAC’s and career preparation, a few things. First, while there are some universities with very career-specific undergraduate degrees like accounting, most of the top national universities provide “liberal arts” curriculums unless you are specifically in the engineering programs. Second, again with the exception of specific fields, many jobs value degrees secondarily behind specific experiences which is why summer internships are so critical. And on that front, the best LAC’s are quite focused on helping their students land competitive internships. The most competitive internships in many fields also actively recruit at the top LAC’s just as they do at the top national universities. Third, the well endowed smaller LAC’s have far more career facilitation resources per student than the large national universities. When I was at UCLA, the career planning and internship resources were minimal. LinkedIn existing now is 10x more useless than anything UCLA could do for it’s students. My son is now at Bowdoin and they have an enter department of full-time people with different career focuses that help students with internship and career planning. You can get unlimited 1-on-1 meetings, sit in on training sessions, mock interviews, how to handle those trick questions or on-the-spot case studies, etc. They bring in guest speakers who were recruiters or execs at different major companies, etc. Absolutely night and day different than my UCLA experience. Even with all that, the most competitive stuff is still brutally competitive of course. Also, note that most people at LAC’s aren’t studying literature or art history. They are taking STEM majors or computer science or economics, etc. – degrees with pretty practical paths toward careers or grad or professional schools. Computer Science is the fastest growing major at most of the LAC’s, as you would expect anywhere.