<p>I guess I'll tell you my stats, then where i'm applying... I only have one safety school right now, and I don't even know if it's fitting in with what i want with college...lemme know</p>
<p>GPA 4.0 (dont know weighted)
All honors/AP classes
SAT I: V 710, M 770, W 800, C 2280
SAT II: Bio 800, Math II just took</p>
<p>dont feel like writing EC, just know theres a bunch</p>
<p>my main EC is interning/volunteering at Fox Chase Cancer center for two years
sports, school stuff, etc, etc</p>
<p>is bucknell in line with all these other schools as a safety? basically i want a more secluded school experience, with a nice campus, etc. Medium sized, although i kinda go all over the chart there, and good bio, although i also want a nice liberal arts edu.</p>
<p>If interested in Colgate and Bucknell, might want to check out fellow Patriot League member-Holy Cross. Holy Cross has a great campus and its location is much better than Colgate or Bucknell,as HC is only 1 hour from Boston. Very long winters at Dartmouth. Duke is fantastic place.</p>
<p>Also, perhaps check out Honors programs at various State Schools...these smaller programs can provide amazing experiences to talented students, and might be a nice safety for you. </p>
<p>If you like Colgate, you might also like Ithaca...Vassar might also be up your ally.</p>
<p>Bucknell is more conservative and much less diverse than the other schools on your list, but its fits what you are talking about and its a good safety (unless they reject you because they think you won't come lol). Look into Middlebury as another match, its sort of similar to some of your schools. Also look at UNC, its around the size of Cornell, in the same area as Duke, and Franklin Street is AMAZING. UNC is awesome. Plus they are very stats driven, so you're in.</p>
<p>Duke,Stanford and Notre Dame offer great combination of academics/athletics. On a smaller scale Colgate,Holy Cross,and Davidson also offer Div1/1aa sports with great academics. Don't see that combination at a Wesleyan, Swartmore,Rochester etc.</p>
<p>Bucknell sounds like a reasonably safe choice for you and I think is fairly similar to Colgate, (which is itself probably a match but not quite a safety for you). But you will have lot be a lot more sparkling your descriptions of ECs on your apps (and they will have to be fairly substantial, too), because numbers alone probably won't do it at the other schools on your list.</p>
<p>Activities:
September 1999-June 2004: Torah Reader
September 2001-June 2004: Torah Leader
September 2001-June 2004: Hebrew High School
September 2001-August 2004: Part-time employment at Tim's Racquet
September 2002-present: Chess Club Member
September 2003-present: Contributing Writer for The Cheltonian, a school newspaper
August 2004-August 2005: Howard Hughes Medical Institute Student Scientist Scholarship at Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia Pennsylvania
September 2005-present: Volunteer researcher at Fox Chase Cancer Center
September 2005-present: French Tutor</p>
<p>Sports:
Ice Hockey CHS Club Hockey September 2005-April 2006
Ice Hockey CHS Club Hockey September 2004-April 2005
Ice Hockey Travel Club Hockey September 1993-April 2004</p>
<p>Awards:
9th Grade:
- Honor Roll First Honors Marking Periods 1-4
10th Grade:
- Honor Roll First Honors Marking Periods 1-4
- National Honor Society Induction, April 2004
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute Student Scientist Scholarship at Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia Pennsylvania, June 2004
11th Grade:
- Honor Roll First Honors Marking Periods 1-4
- Williams College Book Award for Scholarship, Citizenship, and Personal Contribution to Cheltenham High School</p>
<p>Intended Major:
Undecided</p>
<p>and my essay is pretty strong i believe.......</p>
<p>Jvhow - my daughter approached safeties this way, with much success - she applied to a rolling admit school as a safety because she could hear back in 4 weeks (she heard in 3 weeks), this school, though was much larger than her preferred size, so she applied to a smaller school that was a financial safety (also happened to be rolling admit, which was a plus), then to a third school that would occupy a place similar to Bucknell for you - hoping for merit money, planning on full price, would be happy to attend. You might want to add one more school - perhaps a rolling admission school if you can, that is no more selective than Bucknell, that you can live with attending. The rest of your list is great, you should have some successes, don't fall totally in love with any one school and you'll be ahppy in the spring.</p>
<p>I also want to put a plug in for Davidson - anyone whose willing to go to Emory, and has Dartmouth on their list, should at least look at Davidson. It has a much smaller Jewish population than Emory, but is very much like a small Dartmouth, or a preppy Swarthmore (heavy duty academics). Has much in common with Williams, but with water skiing, as well as some snow skiing in the mountains. Convenient to Charlotte (good air service), and you would provide geographic diversity. </p>
<p>I wonder why Williams or Brandeis aren't on your list?</p>
<p>I LOVED Dartmouth to no end. When I visited Davidson it was fun for the weekend but come Sunday I wanted the first plane out. Sure, the campuses are both beautiful and there are LACish, but that is where the similarity ends. Davidson is homogenous, conservative, and religious where Dartmouth is diverse, liberal. and intellectual (not to say religion isn't intellectual, its the way they are religious). the student bodies are absolutely different. Davidson's student body reminded me of a smarter Miami Ohio.</p>
<p>well thats not good...i heard miami of ohio students like openly agreed with bush or something like that....actually i think i saw that somewhere on the boards...</p>
<p>anyway, yeh, stats were uhh...updated...haha</p>
<p>Davidson isn't all that conservative and is no more confining than Williams or any other LAC in a small town; in fact proximity to Charlotte makes it quite a bit less isolated from "real life" than many other comparable schools. It does have a very small Jewish population and thus might not be quite what the OP is looking for, but it certaibly seems to try sincerely and successfully to be welcoming to the Jewish and other non-Christian students that it has. </p>
<p>There are any number of reasons why one might prefer a specific school or like one less than others but I wish people on CC would stop stereotyping Davidson as a place filled with or only suitable for religious right wingers (an identity that seems to have rather negative connotations on this board). (It is not so very long ago, incidentally, that Dartmouth was considered uncomfortably conservative by many people because of its very conservative and sometimes ethnically offensive publication, the Dartmouth Review--hope I got the title right. Stereotyping comes and goes.) In any event, it might not be such a bad thing for the rising generation to learn to live with, respect, and even like, people whose political and other beliefs are not identical to ther own. There is a world out there where Democrats and Republicans are friends and colleagues, and where you don't have to talk about your religious differences in a shrill way but can share ideas and learn something about how other people live and think. It is my belief that Davidson is a school where people can learn to live like that, and if that makes it conservative and religious rather than ethical, tolerant, and civic-minded, that is news to this nonreligious, mildly liberal northerner.</p>