@cobrat her course workload is very heavy despite insane extracurricular activities. Her prep school is very rigorous.
Being Asian kid with financial need is brutal admission requirement as she will be judged against other stellar kids.
Her mentor at summer research is more confident than we are as she is the only high school kid admitted and doing similar cutting edge research that other PhD students are doing.
The issue is if one’s relying on a merit scholarship to attend Gtech, being better than the average engineering/CS student there will be the bare minimum requirement for keeping that scholarship beyond freshman year.
If she has no safeties on her list, what is her plan if she gets shut out[1]? Will she attend community college and try to transfer to a state university later?
[1] A forseeable possibility if the application lists consists of super-reaches HYPSM, an “In State University” that is not a safety, and a bunch of unaffordable schools.
Do you have a link that states that she has to maintain a certain GPA. Thanks, and yes I hope ahe can maintain that GPA or cut on extracurricular activities, but that will be her choice provided she gets admitted first
She will attend SUNY schools, Two SUNY schools are there
Most scholarships require a minimum GPA to maintain the award. GT’s Provost scholarship, for example, requires a 3.0 GPA.
http://admission.gatech.edu/freshman/provost-scholarship
3.0 is typical, but keep an eye out for ones that require a 3.5 or higher…
Once again, GT is being used as an example. You’ll find plenty of OOS public universities that offer these competitive scholarships. Many are far less competitive than Tech.
It can be misleading as in engineering/CS schools as rigorous as GTech, the cumulative average of students is likely to be well below 3.0.
At another college with a strong engineering/CS program, having a 2.8 cumulative GPA in engineering/CS would place that student in the top third of his/her engineering/CS class.
@cobrat is GT harder than MIT? My two daughters while at Harvard took classes at MIT, and they thought MIT was no harder than Harvard, both of them got into suma cum laude
The average undergraduate GPA at Tech is over a 3.0. Much higher than back in the 90’s or 80’s (Tech has also become much more selective since then…).
This table breaks it down by lower (Fresh/Soph), upper and grad level students, and by college. For the college of engineering, the lower level student GPA was 3.18.
http://factbook.gatech.edu/academic-information/distribution-of-grades-table-5-13/
EDIT: College of Computing average lower level GPA was 3.11, upper was 3.45 (since the op is looking into a CS major).
It’s right up there with MIT.
As for your Ds, what they experience sounds like a fluke considering the few* Harvard undergrads I knew who took engineering/CS courses at MIT felt it was much more rigorous and had a higher workload.
- In the MIT-Harvard cross-registration....the impression I got from students/alums of both is that far more MIT students took classes at Harvard than the other way around. And many of those did it to boost their undergrad GPAs...and succeeded.
In addition, my daughters have done summer internships in different fields at MIT while in high school but they did not take summer classes.
@cobrat I have heard that female are sought after in MIT. So how much a female gets boost at MIT if she just being a female with higher GPA and test scores than middle 50 percent admitted students pool
@cobrat what college did you attend?
Women do get a slight boost.
However, considering MIT is one of the schools at the very academic apex in engineering/CS(alongside Caltech, CMU, Stanford, Berkeley), she’ll still have exceedingly stiff competition.
I graduated from Oberlin.
However, I attended a NYC public magnet HS full of aspiring engineering majors and a branch of my family are heavily populated by engineers…including some who have graduated from the very top engineering/CS schools(Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, etc)…and some were East Coast folks. A few of those classmates/relatives also are/were tenure-track/tenured engineering/CS faculty.
I also work regularly with engineering/CS folks professionally in the computer technology field.
- An older cousin who graduated from Caltech in EE, got his PhD in the same field from a top 8 school in his field, and worked as tenure-track/tenured EE Prof left academia to co-found an engineering tech startup on the West Coast ~10 years ago which has grown and he's still one of the partners at that firm.
Time will tell what comes next, but this search is on
MIT’s 2016 Common Data Set http://web.mit.edu/ir/cds/2016/c.html
Total first-time, first-year (freshman) men who applied 12,750
Total first-time, first-year (freshman) women who applied 5,556
Total first-time, first-year (freshman) men who were admitted 780 (6.1%)
Total first-time, first-year (freshman) women who were admitted 739 (13.3%)
It’s possible that women are a stronger group than the men. Or as a student member of the admissions committee said years ago, that they found women did better at MIT even if they came in with slightly lower stats. It’s pretty clear, that MIT wants a fairly even M/F ratio, and are able to get it because the candidate pool is strong enough. I’d say it looks like more than a “slight” boost, though obviously the odds aren’t great for either men or women since you have to assume that most students who apply are more than qualified.
I think the recommendation from the summer research mentor should be a help.
This is possible considering MIT can intimidate even many topflight students to the point of not applying in the first place regardless of gender.
College EFC
RPI 41967
WUSTL 37595
Boston University 65906
Vanderbilt 68210
Rice 31825
WUSTL and Rice looks very interesting
OP- right now you are researching colleges based on overall rankings. You need to realize that some of the elite colleges are NOT the best for computer science. It looks like you live in NY so your biases are formed by your region. I sure hope you back off on the prestige and funding factor. You have done your financial research. Now put that aside. Start a new search based on academics in computer science. Look at grad school rankings for math and CS. Then see which schools make both your lists.
Next abandon both of the above lists. Let your D make lists of schools that intrigue her. See which ones seem to fit her academic desires and affordability.
When thinking about colleges realize your D is attending a school that is good compared to your other choices but that there is so much excellent public education throughout the US that there will be plenty of students who went to HS and learned as much without any prestige assigned to the school.
When your D (and yes, it is her life and her choices) comes up with a list of schools that interest her for a variety of reasons, including NONACADEMIC, it will be your job to help her figure out the affordability. You do not pick the school, she does, after consultation with you regarding affordability. If she is too busy keeping up with her school work to find the time for college searching (btw she has summer to do it now) she will not be as competitive as the students who can find time to do their own searching.
I hope you understand that you are just the parent. Your D is becoming an adult and should be learning to take charge of her life. She is an American, despite your background. btw- my gifted (also had a 2400 SAT) son went to our public HS, top tier flagship and is doing well with CS after choosing it instead of math grad school. My H is Indian so I have knowledge of the highly educated immigrant world. There are many parts of the country outside the NE where public HS’s are the norm for the rich and their gifted students.
Consider that Wash U (St Louis) is not as good in math/CS than several flagship (public) U’s. Likewise the vaunted Harvard may not be the place for the best CS students. Look also at overall costs. Travel, daily living expenses and other costs may vary a lot. The student body will vary as well.
I assume your D is on scholarship to attend her prep school. The prep school likely was better than your local public school. This does not mean your D is more competitive than plenty of public school students from other parts of the country. Keep in mind that many private school students are there because their parents have money, not all students are better than their public HS peers.
A long post here. Wanted to give you a different perspective. You live in your NY area world. Note that it is different elsewhere in the country.