I would add that most of your schools are universities, and I think you would have fared better by applying to more colleges. They tend to be more holistic in their evaluations. Even for a math kid, your math is unusually strong, and a conversation with a math prof or two at a LAC would help your admission chances. Look at schools that are less selective but whose students have pretty good stats.
OP, if you stick with WSU my suggestion is that you dig deeper. As a full time undergrad there you might have more options to get involved in the math department with either research or self-directed classes. As a HS student trying to strengthen a HS transcript to go to a “better” college you might not be priority to top professors - as actual student you might be. Also, having many of you math major coursework done you are now free to double major of explore other classes or finish in 3 years/ finish a masters in the 4 year.
I may have missed your career goals, but if in math or potentially PhD the you’ve got lots of options. For instance, You could augment your math with business if potentially interested in finance.
I was planning on taking 4 years of science, but that didn’t end up working for scheduling reasons. My school doesn’t offer AP physics, which is the type of science class I’d want to take, so college physics seemed reasonable, and was my plan initially, but I got stuck on the waitlist for the class because non dual-enrollment students got priority, and didn’t get in.
AP English might be considered more rigorous generally, but I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have been the case at my high school. In addition to teaching very few AP classes, AP Human Geography, Literature, and Composition are all taught by the same teacher, and after taking AP Human Geography I had absolutely no interest in taking another one of her classes. I learned basically nothing in that class, and we got through only about half the material we were supposed to by the AP exam, far less than even what remained after COVID dropped some sections from the exam.
I took three years of foreign language, and brought up one year from middle school.
I’m sorry to say, but you will have to deal with the same in college. You will likely have to take boring and uninteresting courses at some point. Saying the teacher was boring won’t fly. If it was boring and she didn’t teach well, you could have still gotten a high grade.
What’s done is done. You can’t take those classes now and your transcript is what it is. I’m pretty sure that, unfortunately, not taking those classes was part of the problem. Colleges care about AP classes because they are standardized. They assume, rightly or wrongly, that the teacher is covering the material needed to pass the test. But the colleges care about the grade more than the test score.
I suggest you get outstanding grades at WSU and transfer.
Yeah. Unfortunately, I had basically no advising from my school. My school counselor was actually one of the people telling me I was worrying too much and I was bound to get into one of the top schools I wanted to get into, and would probably have my pick between a couple on my list. My school was actually telling me to be less cautious than I was naturally inclined to be, although that wasn’t cautious enough either.
Colleges that claim to “meet 100% need” can give very different net prices due to differences in the way they calculate “need”. So it is not a safe assumption that if one such college is unaffordable / affordable that all other colleges making the same claim will be unaffordable / affordable.
Spending some time looking into the college more deeply before calling. I’d like to actually know why it’d be a great place to go before calling explaining that I’d like to go there and was curious about if the NM deadline was flexible.
On that note, why is it being suggested so frequently here, other than the potential financial package? Is it just the small class size? Is it considerably more academically rigorous school than WSU? It’s not somewhere there seem to be a particularly large number of conversations about online, so I don’t currently have much perspective on how it compares to other schools.
I noted most - because yes, CWRU is not going to be as generous as Princeton but will likely be similar to others.
Nonetheless, running NPCs should have been part of the process in picking schools. Often times, students don’t know the true family financial situation and hopefully the parents were involved.
A lot of people have suggested graduating early from WSU. If I pursue a graduate education, is graduating early actually desirable? I would’ve thought that instead using the head start I’ve got to take even more advanced classes as an undergraduate would result in a better grad school application. And that’s not even considering that financial aid would probably be worse once I got into a graduate program. Do graduate schools prefer you take advanced classes as a graduate student instead, if you have the chance to take them earlier?
For PhD program admissions, early graduation is probably not a plus or minus by itself. It may matter in terms of how it affects your course work (e.g. if you graduate early and forego additional courses in your major beyond the bare minimum, that could be a minus, but if you attend a college where you run out of courses in your major, it may be better to graduate early than mark time with nothing else in your major to take) and the undergraduate research you do there.
PhD programs worth attending should be funded with a tuition waiver and living expense stipend, often in exchange for being a TA, though different universities’ living expense stipends may be better or worse relative to their local costs of living. But you do want to avoid having a lot of undergraduate debt while living on a PhD student stipend.
Professional schools (e.g. law, medical) will generally be expensive, and are usually funded with lots of loans.
It will be closer in experience to some on your list than a WASU will.
It has an average class size of 11 or 13 (they show inconsistent data here) faculty to student ratio of 10, and so on. The Golden Hurricane actually play in an athletic conference against Rice, SMU, Tulane - so they keep good company.
It’s not a Rice or Tulane or SMU - it’s definitely a notch below but it’s the kind of school where their students who don’t get in go - or they go for the big scholarships.
It’s the smaller school experience (and if you get NMF free) vs. a WASU.
One isn’t necessarily better than the other - but it seems like that’s what you were after - not small, but smaller. Tulsa is smaller than the others on your list.
So it could be a nice consolation prize.
You say you are low income - how is the cost for you of WASU, etc.?
If you went by pedigree, one is rated by US News 137 and one 212 - but that really means little. It’s the experience that would be vastly different.
Determining net cost was probably possible, but considerably more messy than it might otherwise be because of my parents being divorced and the fact my dad wasn’t planning on contributing anything. He contributes more than twice the income my mom does, so including him in the equation has a huge impact on the resulting aid, but it wasn’t always clear how he should be included because he isn’t custodial and isn’t planning on contributing. I actually asked about the situation on some college tours I went on, and the only real response I got was to talk about the situation with the financial aid office if I got in.
Separately, I didn’t realize there was so much variance in the meaning of “100% of demonstrated need.” Since I couldn’t just use an online calculator, I thought that places that claimed that would be as affordable as anywhere that didn’t offer outstanding scholarships.
Without being a National Merit finalist, going to WASU would actually have been fairly financially difficult, only possible with parent plus loans that would have been rather big for my mom’s income. My dad wouldn’t have been willing to take on any of that. I’ve got 3 siblings, my mom doesn’t work, my stepdad works doing manual labor, and the majority of the household income actually comes from veteran benefits.
Just to give one example from last year: my daughter (FAFSA EFC = $35k) was admitted to two schools that both “meet 100% of demonstrated need.” Our out-of-pocket cost at School A would have been $52k (because they defined our “need” conservatively and offered mostly loans), while School B was $18k (because they could afford to define “need” very generously).
For each college where you may be applying for need based financial aid, you need to check whether it wants non-custodial parent information. This usually means looking at the “apply for financial aid” pages on the college’s web site to see what it requires. A short cut is the second-to-last column of CSS Profile Participating Institutions and Programs , but that should be verified on the college web sites (e.g. Princeton does not use CSS Profile at all, but does use its own form and requires non-custodial parent information if your custodial parent is not remarried). If it does, then any net price calculator calculation for that college needs to include both parents’ income and assets.
Also, if he will not cooperate at all with financial aid forms, then those colleges that require his information will not offer any financial aid.
The two “good financial aid” schools that do not generally require non-custodial parent information are Chicago and Vanderbilt. Since you apparently now have a stepfather (implying your mother is remarried), Princeton could count in this category for you.
Hmm. I didn’t realize there was a consistent way to see that. When asking people about those details at Q&As and tours, the people typically didn’t know or said it would be approached on a case-by-case basis. I have done FAFSA, CSS, and IDOC, and made sure to check if the schools needed anything extra, so that wasn’t an issue.
I don’t really have much data here, to be fair. The only places I’ve seen official financial aid offers for were WASU and CWRU.