When your daughter ask recommendation, it might be good idea to give him her resume. This helps the teacher to connect your daughter from his classroom to other aspect of your daughter and all the other recommendation letter will align well with her essays.
Some schools call this a “brag sheet” and have a specific form that the student is supposed to fill out.
The idea is to tell the people who write recommendations about aspects of the student’s life and accomplishments that they might not otherwise know about. I think having this information is especially important in cases like your daughter’s, where the student is heavily involved in an extracurricular activity that has nothing to do with school. Recommendation writers won’t know about that activity unless she tell them, and that activity is a big part of what makes her an interesting person.
@everydaythings Thanks for the update. You are doing a good job of beginning to peel the college admissions and selection onion.
Thoughts:
- Naviance. You don’t need your D’s info in the system to get what you need. Given her grades and scores, I would develop a list of schools including her state flagship and better. Then I would look up the scattergraph each one and write down the average act admitted, average gpa admitted, most importantly, estimate the percent of students with her grades and tests scores that were rejected (percentage of red marks compared to green ones that are higher and to the right of where your D’s point should be). This last indicator is important. For many schools there will be none. That would imply that they have admitted them all, and your chances are very high.
- Information that would help us help you. If you can tell us what state you live in and your ethnicity, that would also be helpful for people trying to provide the best information we can. For example, your state flagship is an excellent choice if you are in California, Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina etc.
- Finding schools and looking at mail. In general, the mail from random schools should be thrown away, in my opinion. The reason is that your D has exceptional statistics, so the best way to find a school that fits her is to determine what you are looking in a college education and experience and then identify the schools that offer that. For the most part, the top schools do not spend a lot of time sending out random brochures. Most schools that send out lots of advertising materials are middle tier or worse.
Because her stats are strong, be sure to check some of the very top universities. I am sure I will get a lot of disagreement, but here are the schools that I believe are the very best: Harvard University, Stanford University, Princeton University, Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, MIT, Duke University, Cal Tech, Dartmouth College, Brown University, Cornell University, Northwestern University, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University.
- Financial options. For financial aid, if you are low income, or even lower middle income, the Ivy league schools and peers often offer the best financial aid, if she is admitted. As income rises, the Ivies and peers become the most expensive, but may be worth the cost for some students depending on interests, personality etc.
- Under the radar. You mentioned that your D "...obviously tests well, but she's not one of those superstar kids, she mostly flies under the radar at school. I get the feeling at parent-teacher conferences that some of her teachers aren't too sure who she is..." What an average teacher sees as a superstar, and what top colleges see as a superstar are often very different. In my experience this is often especially true for girls. Please don't assume she can't compete with the "superstar" students.
I have friends like that, some because they don’t know what they want and some because they are fearful of change but don’t want to admit it. What does your daughter want to do? I would ask her directly about how she feels about the whole process, this might open some doors. Good Luck!
The random mailings are unlikely to be a good use of college hunting time–they are mostly glossy marketing brochures from very small schools that aren’t as good as the ones which will likely hand her generous scholarships. Most of ours ended up unopened in the trash after my daughter was done. It’s not that hard to find out what schools enroll high stats kids like her, and which ones are possible sources of a nice scholarship, but I think your time would be better spent on this site and on the college sites themselves rather than opening all that spam.
There’s some great advice on this thread, OP. You are very restrained in describing your daughter’s qualifications. My DS is also in 11th grade, and we are similarly overwhelmed, but a little farther along than you are in that we have a good idea about how competitive he will be at certain colleges.
From what I can tell, your daughter is a strong candidate for almost any school in the country. Her 99 GPA is the most important factor, and the very high test scores make her even stronger. The Ivies and equivalent schools are looking for something special, and being a nationally ranked mountain biker certainly qualifies. She’s also done some non-profit work - has she had any leadership roles there? Helped to start the organization? Organized fund-raisers? Held an office? And she’s worked part-time.
In your place, this is what I would do:
- Identify a few of the most selective schools that might be a good fit for your daughter. From what I've read, I would look at Harvard, Princeton, Swarthmore, University of Chicago, Wesleyan, Carleton, Vassar. (Before anyone jumps on me, I do realize that Vassar is much, much less selective than the first 3, and Wesleyan and Carleton are less selective, but I love those schools and would choose them over HP for my DS if it were up to me.) Schools in this category do not give merit aid but are very generous about meeting financial need. And I believe all are need-blind. You will be able to determine quickly if these schools are possibilities for you.
- Identify a few good schools that give merit aid. I would suggest Franklin and Marshall and University of Rochester off the top of my head.
- If you find that you are likely to get enough financial aid from the need-only schools, then I would focus on finding about 8 of them that would be good fits for your daughter. (Remember that although she is a candidate for those schools, the acceptance rates are very low for some so her chances are by definition low.) Apply to those, and to a few merit-granting schools (be sure to demonstrate interest), and to your state u as a financial safety.
- Check to see whether your daughter's PSAT score is likely to make her a NMSF. You can find state cutoffs for the past few years online. Someone here has done detailed analysis and predicted this year's cutoffs for a number of states. If you want to see this thread, PM me and I'll find it for you. In general, she found that this year's cutoffs would be about the same as last year's. Being a NMSF brings automatic merit scholarships at some schools - 50% tuition at USC, I believe.
- Get help from the GC and from people here on how to present your daughter's extra-curriculars on the Common App. This is hard for kids, and parents, to do. For example, my DS was invited to apply for NHS. He saw the requirements for leadership, became discouraged, and said that he didn't have anything to list there so he may as well not apply. I didn't see any obvious leadership, either, but I suggested that he ask his GC for help. She helped him fill out the form and she did find leadership positions (like 1st trumpet in the band).
Best of luck! Some of the schools I suggested are on my DS’ list, and maybe they’ll end up in the same place!
You guys…
I speak in defense of the lowly mailing. The generic letter. The trifold extravaganza. (I do draw the line at the DVDs and CDs, ugh). Many of our very best early college fact-finding memories are looking at these mailbox-cloggers. S1 was an academic struggler and it made him feel less like damaged goods to see someone – anyone – might have an interest in him enough to send him mail. He chose to visit a school that he might have otherwise ignored, based on information in their mailings, just to see what that “kind” of school was like. Watercooler conversation at school was accessible for him, after all. S2 is a creative person with great grades and we got some fascinating stuff from schools. The RIT obsession with bright orange became a running joke. The college in Florida on the beach would NOT go away, that was a joke too. We saved a bunch of Emerson’s magazines because they had information that informed his search, even if it didn’t draw him to Boston.
We understood, and they did, that a flyer in the mail is just targeted marketing, not anything more. But it was a fun spot in an otherwise stressful task. We put them all in a basket, and when deposits were down at their school of match/choice/acceptance, we took the basket to the fire circle and burned it all. (And someone commented “hey, it’s an RIT fire, it’s orange…”)
I always like the colleges that have the same six diverse kids in every photo shoot. 
But flyers are not all bad. I loved the ones from Harvey Mudd “Our name is Mudd.” and the U of Chicago ones I thought gave a good sense of the place.
BTW you may think your daughter is flying under the radar, but teachers generally like to write good recommendations. The trick is figuring out which teachers really will say something special. My younger son had two teachers that really went the extra mile for him.
A note on the “brag sheet”. Since her EC in an outside school activity I would suggest maybe a picture of her doing that activity be included with her resume/brag sheet for her letter writers… A picture of her might provide the inspiration a LOR might need to get started or personalize her LOR. It would provide a view of a different dimension of her as a person not just as a student in their respective classes.
Your daughter’s application tells a story about her. A cohesive story which can be remembered and remarked upon. The stats get her in the door for the super selectives but a personality and story can get her in. This is conveyed in her LORs and her essays. Ad comms are building a class, sounds like she would bring much to any campus.
Kat
@NYMomof2: F&M no longer gives merit aid (sadly) as of a year ago. Also, I would be careful about sending a daughter to Wesleyan University: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/03/the-dark-power-of-fraternities/357580/
Wesleyan may have issues but frats have been a minimal part of social life there for decades as compared to many other colleges and last year they voted to force the handful of remaining frats to become co-ed or to shut down. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/09/23/wesleyan-university-orders-its-fraternities-become-coeducational