OP you may be correct since your school uses Naviance. My kids went to a public school and we did not have access to that. I will say that Purdue over enrolled to the tune of 1000 students this last year because their yield was 2% higher than was estimated. How this affects next years class will be seen. They are planning on having new dorms open in 20/21.
The conversation surrounding Purdue makes it sound like students are being dropped left and right. Purdue does have a different mission than private schools like Stevens or Cornell or even public schools like Michigan where a student from Michigan not accepted to Michigan does have the option of being accepted to the other state flagship Michigan State. Purdue is Indiana’s STEM flagship and for engineering is a top 10 school. The conversation surrounding the transition to major at VT or Purdue has concentrated on guarantees. Most students who choose to stay in engineering are accepted into their chosen major and do so with lower GPA’s. Here is a description of Purdue’s “Transition to Major” system.
Each school has it’s system. Purdue and VT’s work well for them. They are well regarded (by most:)) and provide a top notch education. So does Michigan, Stevens, Cornell, the University of Cincinnati, and any of the hundreds of research schools that offer engineering. Good luck. You’ll do great.
Virginia Tech has general engineering, not pre - engineering. If you are accepted into engineering, there is support. It gets old with some people anytime Purdue and Virginia Tech are mentioned , implying they are weed out programs.
OP, many if not most posters on CC would consider “safety school” to be a term of art, where admissions is a slam dunk AND which is affordable w/o taking on loads of debt; so there is a financial component as well as an admissions component.
“But again: Are there any other schools you would suggest me to consider?(I’ve been looking at BU and Stevens)”
You already have 13 schools and you’re applying to Cornell ED and four others EA, so that’s a lot of work coming up and if you get in to Cornell, you’re done assuming the FA works out. If you’re deferred and one of UM, Purdue comes through, you’re going to be hard pressed to find better colleges for MechE, unless you consider MIT, Stanford, Cal Tech.
If you want to add with no extra work, add a couple of UCs, Berkeley and Santa Barbara, would be my advice. Tufts and Case as mentioned above would be my recommendations, but I’d replace two colleges instead of applying to 15.
If you have not already done so, check out WPI at these locations for:
Program overview @https://www.wpi.edu/project-based-learning/wpi-plan
Departments programs and related faculty @ https://www.wpi.edu/academics/departments
A listing of some recent biomimicry directed work @ https://www.wpi.edu/search/google/biomimicry#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=biomimicry&gsc.sort=
Heart tissue development @ https://www.wpi.edu/news/wpi-team-grows-heart-tissue-spinach-leaves
Poke around regarding music etc.
A very diversified ME department in a university heavily involved in ME in a wide span of directions. Average UNWEIGHTED GPA of freshman in fall of 2018 is 3.89 (@ https://www.wpi.edu/news/class-2022-welcomed-campus)
A very fine list of universities. See what fits you.