<p>Bio if necessary:
4.0 unweighted GPA
1st in class (along with maybe ten others), mainly because all our grades are unweighted
2 APs, 2 honors junior year (scored 5 on both), and likely 5 or 6 APs next year
2300 SAT (800 M 730 CR 770 WR)
800 on SAT II Math and Chemistry
4 years of Cross Country, with some impressive stats
Mathletes Team, with a couple scholarships
Yadda yadda yadda</p>
<p>I'm not interested in hearing how hard it is for me to get into an Ivy or top university/LAC. I know it's a crapshoot. However, those are the only schools I've looked into because they possess all the qualities I'm looking for: good education, great faculty, attractive need-based financial aid, comfortable college environment. Harvard, Brown, Yale, Williams, Amherst, Bowdoin, etc. Yes, extremely difficult</p>
<p>I need help finding schools that I'll be just as happy attending that I can be confident about being accepted to, given my academic record. Any ideas for schools that I should focus on? Ones preferably with:
-good science departments
-good undergraduate teaching (no TA's teaching classes)
-small population (to easily make friends and find my place)
-d3 sports and good intramural program
-lots of great options for study abroad</p>
<p>Any general advice on safeties or matches (range of acceptance rates to look for, maybe)?</p>
<p>And also: should my own state schools (CA: UCs) carry more weight in this search than other schools?</p>
<p>It’s better to look at common data sets instead of overall acceptance rates. For example, SDSU has a 30% acceptance rate but it’s nowhere near as selective as Grinnell College, even though Grinnell’s acceptance rate sits at 50%.</p>
<p>By this do you mean no TAs involved at all, or just no TAs leading classes, but may be present for discussion and lab sections supplementing faculty led classes?</p>
<p>A typical doctoral granting university will have PhD students as TAs running discussion and lab sections to supplement faculty led classes. They may also be used for beginning foreign language and English composition courses. This is generally true for both UCs and the usual super-selective schools (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc.).</p>
<p>LACs and master’s universities (such as CSUs) will generally not have as much in the way of TA involvement. LACs may be more limited in upper division courses, and will not have graduate level courses, although some have cross registration agreements with nearby research universities to allow more course selection at the cost of commuting.</p>
<p>What major and post-graduation goals do you have? Pre-meds may find LACs to be advantageous (since the usual pre-med courses tend to be among the largest at any given school), but math majors who are already advanced may find LACs to be disadvantageous (since advanced math majors tend to jump directly past the big lower division math courses into small upper division math courses and take graduate courses as undergraduates).</p>
<p>Have you run net price calculators on UCs and other schools? Remember that safeties must be affordable.</p>
<p>With your academic stats, athletic ability might just get you over the hump and into an Ivy. A x-country kid from my DD’s school got into a New England Ivy. He was near the top of his class, but I don’t think his test scores were as good as yours. His athletic ability definitely helped. I also have a friend here in Nor Cal who’s a track coach. His son, a track star (field events), had academic stats well below yours, but Harvard was still very interested. Eventually he did not get an offer from Harvard, but he got a great offer from Northeastern (maybe a safety for you?), where he is starting this fall. My friend told me that the New England schools LOVE California track kids.</p>