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Wondering if this family completed the financial aid application forms which are required for need based aid at RPI which can be awarded in addition to merit. Wondering what level of merit aid this student received at RPI. This makes it sound like there should have been somethingâŠof course, not guaranteed.
RPI : In addition to its generous need-based financial aid program, Northeastern University awards merit scholarships, including the prestigious Deanâs Scholarship, to select students. Recipients are awarded between $10,000 and $28,000 annually .
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@davidng Did your family fill out the FAFSA and, when required, the CSS Profile?
If not, please call the financial aid offices for the colleges you are considering and ask what your options are at this time.
Also, please go to each collegeâs website and look for their net price calculator and fill it out. If the financial aid from the net price calculator is different than what your sonâs financial aid package is, please call the financial aid office and ask them to explain. It may be that you (or your son) filled out the financial aid forms incorrectly and that is something that might be able to be adjusted.
Good luck!
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OP
Please do not take a gap year with hopes of applying to Questbridge as your son will not be an eligible candidate.
Class Year Eligibility
In order to be eligible to apply to the National College Match in the fall of 2021, applicants must graduate from high school during or before the summer of 2022 and plan to enroll as a freshman in college in the fall of 2022.
https://www.questbridge.org/high-school-students/national-college-match/who-should-apply
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Seems like a lot of too perfect kids got imperfect results. I doubt there was any systematic issue at all. Weâve heard many stories of NMFâs without any school acceptances except state. Seems like there TO is changing the landscape a lot for top stats kids.
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GAP year students are eligible for QB. QB says âapplicants must graduate from high school during or before the summer of 2022â, so a student who graduated in June 2021 did in fact graduate before the summer of 2022, and would have been eligible to apply for QB Fall 2022.
The student must not have taken any college courses during their gap year though (so have maintained incoming freshman status).
hkimpossible from the infamous reject train thread was a gap year student who applied thru QB in 2020.
OP can contact QB to verify questions@questbridge.org, although I encourage them to apply to some of the NMF schools mentioned above and go to college this fall.
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This is insane! I suspect it is his essays? Over his gap, have him apply to internships at startups - I know many that would take someone like him.
Best of luck! I am so sorry, he absolutely is qualified for many schools he was rejected from.
YesâŠbut that doesnât mean he has a chance to be accepted to those schools if he re-applies.
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Itâs a blackbox, if itâs really his essays that werenât up to par, fixing that would approve his chances quite a bit. I agree the chance is low, but worth it trying again to me considering the schools he got into.
Are you saying changing the essays can turn a âNoâ into a âyesâ at a school that previously denied OP, all things being equal?
Of course we donât know if the essays were problematic, the LoRs could be lacking.
Fundamentally thereâs not much time, 6 months or so, before OP would have to get 2023 apps in, if they did take a gap yearâŠ.thatâs not much time to move the needle EC wise.
I highly recommend that users not PM essays to anyone they donât know.
An alternative avenue for essay review is outlined below.
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Sorry about that! Iâm new to college confidential, used to just giving advice on Reddit, and I totally didnât know this was against the rules. Sorry again!
Thatâs very fair. I guess I was going off the fact that USACO, USAMO, Google Code Jam are very good ECs already, in my opinion. I donât know how much more he could improve there, so I made a (perhaps hasty) assumption it was something like essays.
On Reddit, there are several international seeking full aid types who have done it.
Or so they sayâŠ
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True. But same could be said of cc.
I would think that the argument for a gap year would be, not so much that he could expect different results from the schools he did apply to this year, but that there are quite a few excellent full-need-met schools, less selective than the super-elites he chose but more selective than the schools now available to him, where a better-crafted application might be very well-received. Also, if he could apply through Questbridge, that could open doors as well. We also still donât know what his own in-state options might be.
HOWEVER, it appears that NMF scholarships are now or never. I agree that UT-Dallas could be a great fit if he could make that happen. A good bird-in-the-hand would be better than gambling on a whole new admissions cycle. But if itâs a gap year vs. the kind of loans that VT or Penn State would require, then heavens yes, take the gap year! Those schools never had the potential to be affordable and should never have been on his list at all. (PSU isnât even affordable for in-state low-income students!) It sounds like RPI is unaffordable as well (which makes sense since they do not meet full need), although pursuing it with their financial aid office is worth a try - it could be a good fit if the money worked.
So, first order of business is to pursue the still-available options for this year, i.e. UTD and the others mentioned upthread. See what the best case scenario is at RPI and whether itâs possible. If none of that works out, taking a gap year and reapplying does have potential, so long as heâs not thinking of it primarily as a do-over with the same list of schools; his prospects are better as a first-time applicant at schools he didnât consider this year. But securing an NMF full ride this year would be ideal; he can always look at transfer and/or grad school options down the road. Rooting for this to turn out well; he sounds like an amazing kid who just didnât know how to navigate the application process.
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usamo kid should get a look from any school, especially t100 usamo. like, thatâs one of the 100 best students in math. adding all the reasons I said above, he actually has a really good chance at a quant job.
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this is more like it â the authorâs son is actually a good candidate for quant and likely would get in regardless of the college he attends
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Only if he gets an interview. The truth is that the big funds do not look past 10-20 schools.
Once he has his 1st job (however he gets it), school is irrelevant.
And there isnât a perfect correlation between how well you do as a quant and how well you do in math competitions. Applying math to real life situations is another skill.
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