Please match me: European-American female, 3.98 UW GPA, 35 ACT, Chemistry & Art History [US+EU citizen living outside the US]

Chance Me / Match Me!
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OK - I’m back.

First is, I see some ‘great names’ above although I think for the most part they are reach names.

You are certainly capable of reaches - but of course, people also need others.

While I like William and Mary myself - it is a haul - with Norfolk and Richmond being closest or Dulles hours away - but again, I think since it’s a few times a year you can make it work.

I think my suggestion of Colleges of Charleston before and you’d likely qualify for Fellows - could work for you. It’s got Art History and a Historic Preservation (few schools offer this major but it’s an area so rich in history). And it’s a safety as is Honors. Fellows would not be. The city also has a wonderful arts presence.

While of course Princeton is fantastic and take your shots at schools like that, and you can find plenty of those types - Emory, Vandy (I think you’d be fine greek wise), Harvard, Yale, Brown, Duke (Raleigh has a non stop I believe to London), Penn, etc. could all be great for you…

A U of Rochester will not be direct and is not coastal but could work for you and be an easier but not easy admit - excellent school in NY.

Tufts is another - full pay will help - need aware and has a museum minor. U of Miami is a target and has European flights. Brandeis would be a target in the Boston area.

There’s other schools throughout the middle of the country - but then they’re not coastal - and others like a GW (too urban), USC (too big) that would be accessible to flights. U Denver would have access to international flights - but is not coastal, etc. It would be safe for you and with merit while a Rice is fantastic but also not coastal - and wouldn’t be safe for you.

Bryn Mawr is smaller but connected with Haverford and Swarthmore and an easier admit. It’s all female as is Mt. Holyoke which is farther from the airport (Boston, Hartford) but is part of a consortium of several schools. Both would be likely.

Anyway, I’ve given some safeties/matches with merit and you’ve got lots of reaches. Make sure you have a safety or merit school that you apply to.

So that gives you a few schools that might have easier access for you.

You might look at curriculums of each school - they seem to vary in areas of study with art history tracks - and that might also inform the decision you make. William and Mary, for example, has three tracks.

Chemistry will obviously be an easier fit for you.

Best of luck

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Scripps College has a strong Art Conservation & Heritage Science program. Art Conservation and Heritage Science - Scripps College - Acalog ACMS™
Research and Internships: The Art and Science of Art Conservation | Scripps College in Claremont, California

Like Barnard, Scripps is a women’s college in a larger co-ed context - in this case, the Claremont Consortium, which also includes Pomona, Claremont McKenna, Pitzer, and Harvey Mudd. The overall student population matches your parameters, with around 7K undergrads. The Art Conservation major is based at Scripps, which also has the most generous merit aid potential among the colleges; but cross-registration is seamless and pervasive, and extracurriculars are shared across the consortium as well. There’s excellent coursework available in Classics and French Literature, if you’re interested in pursuing those further, and the shared 5-College student newspaper is top-notch as well. Scripps + the Consortium seem to cover all of your criteria quite well.

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So my understanding is most people on an art conservation path get a graduate degree of some kind, and therefore you really just need colleges that would be generally good for art history (and chemistry). That is not a very restrictive requirement, which is great. But if you would be interested in an undergraduate program anyway, my understanding is the University of Delaware has a good undergraduate art conservation program:

Delaware is bigger than you are looking for, but it is conveniently located for the Philly International Airport. Delaware is also well-known for chemistry, and would be less expensive than a private college even OOS.

Otherwise, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and Penn seem like good fits, and I agree you could look at Barnard too. Georgetown because of the legacy factor, although I am not sure they really count as a great academic fit.

WUSTL might be worth checking out despite not being coastal. I note St Louis now has direct flights to Frankfurt, and WUSTL has a really great campus in a nice location, and they are a generally strong interdisciplinary college with a robust Art History program that also promotes a lot of study abroad:

https://arthistory.wustl.edu/undergraduate

WUSTL has ED II, and is a popular ED II at my feederish HS for kids who don’t get into Ivies in the ED/REA round (also popular ED I for that matter; it is a very attractive college).

Finally, my understanding is George Washington (Corcoran) is also very good for Art History:

You could double major with Chemistry if you liked, and they have several Chemistry options including both BA and BS options, which might be handy depending on exactly what you end up wanting to do:

GW is just over the high end of your size range, but DC is a great location for both museums and international flights.

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“medium size (c. 3,000-10,000), ideally not rural, defined campus (i.e. not NYU or BU),”

GW won’t work as it’s the triumvirate with BU and NYU. My daughter had us leave the tour - it’s so urban like NYU etc.

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Personally, I find GW’s Foggy Bottom campus to be reasonably well-defined in comparison to, say, NYU’s Greenwich Village campus. It is also a good academic fit in a great arts and globally-connected city that is significantly less selective than most of the colleges that are similarly good academic and locational fits and that neatly fit all the OP’s criteria.

But obviously it is up to the OP to decide whether or not it is an acceptable compromise (same with Delaware or WUSTL, and a variety of other options people have mentioned that do not strictly comply with the OP’s stated preferences).

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Defined but indistinguishable from the city. The student also wants a less political school. In DC that’s less likely - especially now unfortunately.

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For anything wrt the East Coast Art world, hard to beat Williams. There’s a reason why their art-related majors are known as the Williams Mafia (+ Year at Exeter College, Oxford). However the college is small&rural - you wouldn’t lack for things to do (they’ve got the endowment to ensure their students have too many things to do/attend) but there’s no direct flight and nothing resembling a city. You’d have to look into its website.

Wellesley has a direct enrollment with Ecole du Louvre- you may want to see which other colleges do. (Unlike Barnard, Scripps and Bryn Mawr where co ed colleges collaborate 24/7 with the women’s college, Wellesley is a women’s college with no associated coed college though Olin is right next door).

G’town is the no-brainer here, though.

Emory, Rice, URochester have sort of the same vibe - academically serious, low on Greek life, clear research+creative combinations.
Seconding Barnard, Scripps, Bryn Mawr, Brown, Penn, JHU, Tufts.

If you don’t want Greek life, there are lots of universities without it.

Some colleges take half or even 2/3 of their class ED so I’d quickly look at colleges with ED2 and choose the one you like best.

To get a sense of colleges, you can read The Princeton review’s Best Colleges 2024 and/or Fiske Guide. Fiske will be more detailed but unless you’ve read college reviews before it’s hard to start with this level of detail and pull out what’s significant wrt your criteria.

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That is not exactly my impression, but again it is up to the OP.

What the OP wrote is “neither political extreme”.

I personally think that is actually a good description of GW. There are, of course, individual students all over the political map, but I think overall it is mostly people who are somewhere in the relative middle range.

But again, whenever people name colleges that do not strictly fit the OP’s stated criteria because they are good fits in other ways, it is of course entirely up to the OP to assess whether they have enough in the way of pros to offset those compromises.

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Thank you for all these suggestions!

I don’t know anyone in the middle of the country, hence my preference for a coastal location. I’d also like to go somewhere in or near a city, as I won’t have a car and will be reliant on walking/public transport.

That said, I still want something of a campus: Barnard/Columbia would be fine, but NYU is too amorphous. I’ll have to look further into GW; it’s a little large but I like DC as a city. @NiceUnparticularMan, in that vein, why do you think Georgetown wouldn’t be a good academic fit?

I have only read positive things about WUSTL, but I still think it’s too inaccessible – one direct service to Frankfurt every three days is not ideal. Scripps looks beautiful and the Claremont consortium does fulfil my criteria. I like the sound of the culture at Emory, Rice, and Rochester, but Atlanta would be the preferable location. I have read that Emory is more realistically located in Decatur – if so, is it difficult to leave the campus without a car?

Are there any honours colleges I should consider?

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For OP, are you applying to schools outside the US? I ask because it is quite late for a senior to be quite so early in the search process by late November. Was there a reason you did not apply to Georgetown early?

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Charleston looks beautiful and the College is very interesting, so thanks for that suggestion! I’m going to do a virtual tour.

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Do you have good options in Europe, and perhaps in the UK?

You could spend quite a bit more money to attend university in the US. A bachelor’s degree in the UK plus a master’s degree in the US might cost less than just a bachelor’s degree in the US, and you will end up with a master’s degree. You should avoid education debt if you possibly can (which sounds like it should be possible).

To me you look to be quite competitive even at the top ranked schools (Princeton and Harvard come to mind, although they do not have any merit aid at all). Of course these top schools are high reaches for essentially everyone and admissions at top schools is very difficult to predict in the US.

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To be clear, it is not what I would call a bad fit either. I just don’t think of it as a college which is particularly strong in either Art History or Chemistry, particularly given its general selectivity. This is distinct from, say, Columbia, which I know has an extremely well-regarded Art History department. Same with GW, but at a very different selectivity point.

Indeed, it looks like GW has around 20-25 Art History graduates per class, which is pretty good for such a major. Columbia has like 35-40 (although that may include Barnard). But Georgetown has around 5-10. So not an impossibility at Georgetown, just not a particularly popular program.

But that doesn’t mean I would discourage you from applying! Again, DC is a great city for both art and international connections. Georgetown is a great overall university. So there are lots of reasons you could choose Georgetown, and I think the academic fit could be good enough even if it wasn’t the best.

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I looked extensively at universities closer to home, but they’re too academically restrictive. As you can imagine, it is much harder to look at universities from abroad (especially from a school that offers little support!) and in the context of the pandemic, my travel to the US over the past few years has been restricted, so I don’t think I’m on an identical timeline to someone of the same age living in the US. I have also considered taking a gap year, which is common and encouraged where I live, but I will apply this year. The EA acceptance rate is lower than the RD at Georgetown, so I didn’t think there was any benefit to applying early.

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You won’t be able to visit any US schools?

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Charleston Honors

Gtown is a campus - an actual separated from the town campus - whereas GW is part of the city. We can disagree but they just got a dining hall. My daughters (and my) interpretation is that it’s just - not distinguishable but obviously others disagree Their meal plan was city restaurants til they recently got a dining hall. But it’s (GW) typically listed with BU and NYU as that type of campus.

American would be the “safety” DC school that has its own campus. GW has a Mount Vernon campus out toward American but it’s not the main campus. You can look that one up.

The public schools are more likely to have an Honors program although some privates have.

The issue with Gtown - and most the schools listed above (not GW, American, Charleston, Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr and some more) - they’re all reaches. So apply - you’re qualified - but you need those back ups.

Emory is not in Atlanta proper - but there is transportation. But not much to walk to nearby in that sense.

So your Charleston (school is in downtown), Vandy,American (15 min walk to subway) - and more - would be walkable to things as would Barnard, Gtown and some others listed above - if you’re looking for that city life but campuses, etc. Pitt (20K-ish) is too big for you but would be another. UMN would be way to big for you - but would be another (with flights).

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You’re right – it would be significantly less expensive to stay in Europe, but it’s too narrow, and I’d be happier with the academic breadth of an American university. I really appreciate your thoughts!

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That makes a lot of sense – thank you!

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I didn’t say that. It’s certainly my intention to visit some schools, but I can’t do an exhaustive national tour.

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Can you visit before applying? It doesn’t matter much if you are only applying regular decision, but if you are considering a binding ED2 to Emory, for example, a visit would be important.

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