I’m a junior right now, and while I have a rough idea of where I may want to apply, I’m not sure if there are other schools that could be a better fit for me that I don’t really know about or I’m having trouble finding.
Stats:
Sex: Female
Race: Asian
SAT: 1530 - 740 EBRW/790 M(1540 superscore, 19/24 essay)
ACT: 36 - 36 E/36 M/35 R/35 S (9/12 essay)
GPA: 4.72W (not sure what unweighted is)
ECs: I am actively participating in generally meaningful (although rather generic) ECs
Requirements:
I’m planning to major in computer science, but there’s a chance I could be interested in biology. If possible, maybe some form of a music program.
I don’t want to go to a really small school, like a liberal arts college with a population of < 4,000 people. I like a diverse and vibrant campus life.
I would prefer a Division I school with club and intramural sports available for track and cross country
Location I would prefer to be near the northeast or on the west coast, but I don’t want anywhere too far away from the northeast. I also don’t want the school to be in the middle of nowhere, at least have there be some large city nearby
Don’t consider money as a factor
I’ve looked at mainly elite schools such as Stanford and Brown as my top/reach schools, and I feel I am a competitive enough applicant. I also have safeties picked out (Rutgers, UIUC). If you have any other suggestions that suit my needs, that would great!
You may need to decide whether you want to only apply to schools where computer science is in the College of Arts and Science as opposed to Engineering.
Cornell sounds like a great environment with the choice of college to choose computer science, great music program and fully funded club sports except the middle of nowhere piece. DD felt the same way about the trek from the coast through small towns with cows in the road.
Northeastern, BU, WPI, NYU
Berkeley and UCSD for west coast.
My observations of current students living in Boston, NYC and Philly is that Philly students benefit from the more manageable but substantial city size and the less expensive family owned resturants and student discounts at events.
Tufts has a good CS program, good biology and other STEM, very good music program, >5,000 students, DIII sports but club sports available too, access to Boston/Cambridge, lots of smart nice kids.
BU and NEU offer a bigger more city like feel, very good academics and D1 sports. NEU has a very good CS program. Personally I like the NEU campus more, and the co-op plan is hard to beat. BU is a pretty vibrant place filled with kids from all over the place.
WPI has an average, unweighted GPA of 3.89. I do not know what their weighted GPA is.
Although it does not have a music major, it has an outstanding music minor program. If you like classical, consider that the Boston Globe reported these STEM students performed Gruppen without the assistance of any music majors.
This moderately sized university of 4,571 undergraduates and 2,087 graduate students focuses on a very highly developed project education system which they started over 50 years ago and they have been refining project based studies ever since. See https://www.wpi.edu/
They operate 50+ off campus project research centers all over the world at no additional costs to the student.
The last two entering classes have had a women to men ratio of about 43% which is very high for a STEM university. CS, Biology, and BME are very strong departments Sixty percent of the Biology and BME majors are women.
This is a Division III University where over 80% of the students participate in athletics and many are clubs. There are over 220 listed clubs and teams as the University is focused on developing teamwork and a balanced day is often helpful to the learning environment.