<p>Paul9,</p>
<p>No need for you to do a gap year. You have been accepted at good institutions. Congratulations for that. I understand your disappointment but turn it into strength for yourself. You have learned an important life lesson and will do well wherever you go. All the best to you.</p>
<p>
[quote]
It just makes me angry that I didn't know the "rules" of college admissions up until recently.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Sigh...Another victim of poor high school advising.</p>
<p>Paul, the consensus seems to be go to college in the fall! And I agree. Get happy - you have two good schools to choose from (personally I'd do Fordham if you can afford it). Sign on the dotted liine for one of them, and you'll be relieved to be getting on with your life. You're going to have fun, really, you are!!! :)</p>
<p>Paul9, please don't spend this entire first year of college planning your transfer, as the # of accepted transfers is small. Reach schools for H.S. freshmen are still reach school for transfers. I would say that you have some good choices right now, schools that you could be happy at academically and socially for 4 years. Go in with that attitude, have a great time, and don't set yourself up for future disappointment. Research and plan your transfer apps. Send them in on time. And then enjoy where you are.</p>
<p>My friend's D, was also given a guaranteed transfer to Cornell after completeing a first year elsewhere, but she had such a great experience at her fourth choice school, that she did not switch to Cornell.</p>
<p>All these folks are giving you some really good advice. I would suggest you re-read dmd77's post. Right on the money.</p>
<p>Also, you might want to note that your gap year idea, of attending CC for a year to boost your gpa won't work at all. Your hs gpa remains your hs gpa.</p>
<p>Stoneybrook is a good school, as is Fordham. SB is getting very popular, in fact. Go for either of these two choices, and good luck.</p>
<p>wow paul you are just like me</p>
<p>i got rejected from every where else except from Stony Brook and CUNY brooklyn college</p>
<p>i have 1370/1970 sat
740 math I, 660 Physics
3.75 GPA</p>
<p>Columbia - rejected
Johns Hopkins - rejected
NYU - waitlisted
Stony Brook honors -rejected</p>
<p>i was kinda embarrassed by this result
my pan is to work my ass off in Stony Brook and hopefully transfers to NYU or Johns Hopkins.</p>
<p>my intend major is pre med</p>
<p>I know things didn't work out the way you expected, but Stony Brook is a really fine school. (Fordham is a good school too, but I'd save the money and use if for grad school- unless Fordham is particularly good for computer science). Try to have a positive attitude- Make the MOST of your stay at Stony Brook- you can always try to transfer out. But I think you will gain alot from your time at Stony Brook and you may find that Stony Brook is the right school for you. Good luck.</p>
<p>And for any OOS parents reading this post- I think Stony Brook is a particularly fine public U in NYS. Very reasonable OOS tuition (under $11,000- broad based programs- especially well known for sciences- nice campus and about 1 1/2 from NYC by LIRR. Since it is too close to home for alot of Long Island kids, our kids look elsewhere- they shlep up to Buffalo and Binghamton. But for kids who want to be "near" NYC and want a safe campus environment, reasonable tuition and a very fine education, you should check out SUNY Stony Brook. (just my opinion from a Long Island mom)</p>
<p>I'm a long islander too. :D The fact Stony Brook is so close is one of the reasons I don't want to go there.</p>
<p>And wow, Chizhang, that really sucks. I'm surprised that you got turned down at NYU with a 3.75, looks like they really do put too much stock in SAT scores.</p>
<p>Blankman- That was uncalled for. They may not have been accepted to the schools they were hoping to be admitted to - but now you are the one that sounds stupid and cruel. </p>
<p>Paul9- we're in Nassau- It seems more LI kids are going the SB route. May not have been the kids first choice- but it is definitely a solid option. I really don't know if Fordham is worth the x-tra $.</p>
<p>marny1,
My idea about the previous post overlapped with yours. Hopefully, I have taken care of the problem and that post will disappear. Paul9, I grew up on Long Island and Stony Brook always had a very good reputation. I have some very bright, successful grown-up friends who graduated from Stony Brook. In fact, one graduated from Stony Brook and went to Fordham for an MBA.</p>
<p>One thing that I think is helpful for all seniors to know is that a lot of the colleges do have specific rules. My son was going to drop English for the third trimester this year, but his guidance counselor told him that that would eliminate BU as a possibility since they requrie four years of high school English. He was going to substitute an advanced existentialism course that was much more rigorous, by the way, it was not an attempt to slack off.</p>
<p>If you take even a brief look through blankman's other posts on this message board, you can see some other great contributions he's made to the community here. This includes useful threads about ranking Dartmouth, Brown, and Duke in terms of prestige (?) and asking if his friend recieved a likely letter from Cornell (??). It is interesting to note that he seems to have trouble asking his friend if he got a likely letter but has no problem insulting me over the internet. It seems to me that blankman is a little too hung up high prestige colleges. I didn't just apply to top schools, either. If you look at the SAT and GPA/class rank ranges for schools like BU, NYU and even CMU (which I obviously did before applying there) you'll see that I can safely consider those schools matches, even if I don't meet your idea of a "top student". So yes, some of these rejections weren't surprises for me, but many of them were also. You help no one on here by stating the obvious, blankman, and I still maintain that my college list was well balanced between safties, matches, and reaches.</p>
<p>That's enough negativity for one post. :) Right now it looks like I'll be sending a deposit into Fordham, since my parents don't mind the tuiton difference. Thanks for all the help once again.</p>
<p>Paul, I am glad that you reached a decision along with your family. Fordham is an excellent school.</p>
<p>paul..you are just the kind of student the Fordham faculty will be so pleased to teach. Give a lot to Fordham and it will double the returns. Great school.<br>
Enjoy!</p>
<p>Paul-</p>
<p>I'm sorry if I came across as harsh, but it is the reality that you were severely underqualified compared to other applicants at those schools. You still had every right to apply, but then to end up surprised at the rejection is rather ridiculous. You aren't even in the top ten percent of your class- essentially everyone at Brown, MIT, and Dartmouth is. Even the majority of the people at BU are. </p>
<p>Your SAT scores only hurt you at the top schools, placing you in the bottom 25% of applicants. You SAT II scores are weak as well. </p>
<p>So the top schools were completely unrealistic. NYU and CMU were big reaches too. Why? At CMU, for example, about 3 of 4 were in the top 10 percent of their class. Your SAT scores are below their average too. To consider them a match shows a lack of judgement. </p>
<p>Don't blame me or call me "negative." I'm a realistic, a pragmatist. In reality you thought you were a far more competitive applicant than you really were. Don't blame the colleges for screwing you over when you think you were qualified. Just because you consider them a match doesn't mean they really are a match or that you deserve to be accepted. Good luck at Fordham.</p>
<p>So how do you find this info out, Blankman?</p>
<p>One way to find out whether a school is a reach or not is to visit their website and find their Common Data Set for recent years. Looking in section C of those standardized reports will give you the 25th & 75th %ile SAT scores for admitted students, % of admitted students in top 10% of their HS class, etc. If your SAT scores or rank fall in the lower end of these lists, you can feel fairly sure you start out applying to these as "reach" schools.</p>
<p>I do not know if blankman did this analysis on the schools mentioned for Paul9's stats, but I presume he may have done so, to make the comments above.</p>
<p>Blankman, in fairness to Paul, in his opening post he said, I'm not surprised by being rejected by some of the top schools but I wasn't expecting this at all. I called BU about the waitlist. In other words, what surprised him is that BU didn't accept him. </p>
<p>I know where he is coming from because my daughter also applied to BU thinking admissions was likely -- in her case the situation was abetted by her gc, who also told her BU was a match where she would probably get in. As we both found out, BU is very strict about required courses for admission - and both Paul & my daughter missed taking math senior year. (In my daughter's case it was a scheduling problem: she had a choice between math or physics and chose physics). </p>
<p>Paul also planned well with safeties like Fordham and SUNY - it's just that rejection hurts, even if objectively it could have been anticipated. There is nothing wrong with a kid reaching -- it worked out well for my daughter. My daughter's test scores were about 100 points lower than Paul's - her class rank was higher, but she didn't take all that many APs and was at much smaller school, and Paul didn't mention his GPA or whether or not ranking was based on weighted grades. But unlike Paul, my daughter was accepted at her reaches, including NYU, which is one that rejected Paul -- that couldn't have happened if she hadn't applied. I'm sure that if she had ever posted her stats in a "chances" thread she would have been pointed toward other schools and advised to not even bother with some of her reaches. </p>
<p>What we don't know here are a lot of intangibles that can't be posted. My daughter had a dynamite interview at the high-reach college she will be attending in the fall, and one of her teachers wrote an amazing recommendation; plus my daughter submitted supplemental material that obviously had some impact. So in hindsight it is easy to come up with an explanation. But we don't know what Paul's essay & recs looked like - he would have as much reason to think those elements would put him over the top as my daughter did. </p>
<p>In any case, Paul will get an excellent education at Fordham. My daughter added Fordham to her list as a last-minute safety, never having visited it -- but every step of the way she felt good about that decision. It's a great school. It just took Paul some time to get used to the idea; I'm sure that is true of most kids who end up attending their safeties. But the fact that a kid tries for a reach college says something very positive: it is the mark of a kid who is not afraid to aim high and face a challenge. And that's not a bad quality to have.</p>
<p>Absolutely calmom..you make many good points, but none better than that Paul is a smart kid who is ambitious and focused and Fordham is a very fine college with a lot to offer him.<br>
Have a great Passover/Easter weekend, Paul.</p>
<p>Mootmom, thanks for the info, but the point is that Paul's stats were comfortably in range for Boston U, which in the past has accepted more than half of its applicants. So it was a logical choice for a match school -- and it really is the only one that Paul expressed surprise over. </p>
<p>And as I've noted before, my daughter's test SAT scores were below the 25th percentile mark at the 3 reach colleges where she was accepted - so basically the SAT ranges don't tell the whole story. Paul says that he considered NYU a match - I considered it a reach for my daughter, but my daughter got in so if anything, I'm the one who is underestimated when determining chances. </p>
<p>Paul wrote that he was frustrated that he did not know the "rules" of college admissions at the outset, and there may be something to that. I don't know, but obviously with a kid going through the process a 2nd time, I did know the "rules"- and so my daughter's results with reach school may be partially attributable to having better advice. </p>
<p>One of the best pieces of advice we received along the way was to ALWAYS make sure to explain any weakness in the records -- NEVER assume that a selective college will overlook or miss the weak spots if you gloss over them. So, for example, my daughter asked her g.c. to explain the scheduling issues that made it impossible for her to take math senior year, and she also explained the problem herself on the application. Paul didn't know to do that -- whether it would have made a difference or not, I don't know. </p>
<p>Paul was also applying to major in an area where math is more important; my daughter's proposed majors did not require any math at all, so it would have been perceived as less of a weakness for her. Paul was rejected from NYU with higher test scores than my daughter. My daughter was accepted, but she wisely chose to apply to Gallatin rather than CAS -- this was mostly a strategic decision, because at the time she applied she would have been just as happy with CAS -- but she and I felt that CAS admissions would be more numbers-oriented, Gallatin more focused on her personal statement and the qualifications she had relevant to her proposed individualized course of study. </p>
<p>Anyway, the point is that test-score range gives a guideline as to what the competition is like, but it really can't be used to assess "chances" either way. The big mistake that so many cc'ers make is assuming that they are certain to get into schools because their stats are at the upper range for that school -- obviously, for the most competitive schools, that doesn't hold true either. You have to look at other factors as well -- it is an equation with many variables, and no single variable is determinative. So I just don't want to second-guess Paul's thinking at this point - I think that he came up with a reasonable choice of colleges. He just didn't quite realize until the end how wise he was to include Fordham & SUNY in the mix. Keep in mind that he also applied to and was accepted at Pace, which to me shows that he was definitely covering all bases.</p>
<p>Calmom, I know of a young man who has a legacy at BU. He went to school in a foreign country between 3rd-11th grade. He is a US citizen, and graduated from a US public hs after attending 12th grade there. English is his foreign language, and he completely bilingual. BU did not accept him b/c admissions could not accept that English was his foreign language.</p>