<p>Hi there....looking for a smaller school in the New Jersey and surrounding areas (up to 2 hours) with a good physics department. My son currently attends a small magnet school and would like that same personal feeling at the college level. His stats are not great - 3.3 unweighted GPA and shooting for a 1900 on SATs(2400) not a ton of extra circ activities on the resume but some. He is very strong on the math/science side (close to 800 on SAT) but average on the reading piece. He thinks he wants to major in physics but has a strong interest in renewable resources/energy.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!</p>
<p>Fairly obvious choices for physics that are not super-selective are Rutgers and Stony Brook, but they probably do not meet the “smaller school” criterion.</p>
<p>However, physics is often not a popular major, so junior/senior level physics and math courses may not be that big (freshman/sophomore level physics and math courses can be big because engineering majors take them, though check to see if smaller honors versions are available). If class size is important, see if any schools under consideration have on line schedule of classes on their web sites.</p>
<p>Thanks for the reply. I think Rutgers is too big and Stony Brook has too many commuters. However your thoughts on the smaller class size once he is to his junior/senior level courses is a very good point. May be able to push him to a mid size school in that case.
I am a huge fan of sending him to rutgers but as we visit colleges I can see he is much more at home in the smaller environment.</p>
<p>Forgot to mention in my original post - we live in eastern/central NJ…so parts of NY,CT and PA are all options.</p>
<p>Linda: first one that came to kind was Drew in Madison, but if we include schools in NY, many, many more smaller ones that may work upstate…Possibly </p>
<p>My D is a senior in HS and wanted a small LAC to study chemistry. We did show her a couple of mid-size schools as well just so she could see her options, but she was really set on a smaller college. We were impressed by a number of the schools we saw.</p>
<p>Upstate NY, I’d check out Union College and Siena College (if a Catholic school works for you). I would have added Muhlenberg but someone beat me to it. There are tons of other LACs in Pennsylvania that you can look into including: Lafayette, Ursinus, Franklin and Marshall, Gettysburg, and Dickinson. Buy a college guide book and start reading so you can get an idea of the average GPA/SAT for the schools. We went back to her top couple of choices and she was able to visit the lab facilities which was really nice. Good luck.</p>
<p>I thought my son’s GPA was low, the school does not rank. The college counselor does not think his GPA is low. I am hoping the school provides scattergrams. The counselor gave me a very strong impression that my kid is higher than I think if the school did rank.</p>
<p>My point - while 3.3 is low here on CC, it may not be low at your school. Many NJ schools do not practice grade inflation. </p>
<p>Many of the PA LACs welcome lopsided kids. Comb through the distribution requirements carefully. If he isn’t strong in the writing side, you do not want to tie him down with a lot of writing intense distribution requirements.</p>
<p>His school does not rank and his GPA is unweighted. The counselor also indicated to me that most school understand the rigorous cirriculum at the magnet schools and take that into consideration. However when I look at the acceptance history I see that some seem to understand more then others:) </p>
<p>Thanks everyone for the continued input! I have been combing through schools and this all helps. Keep them coming!</p>