Schools for Math and Other Stuff

College Search & Selection
1

Hello! Just beginning my college search and in need of a lot of guidance.

For a rough idea of who I am as an applicant, my SAT scores are going to be 1550-1600 (practice tests suggest as such), my grades are all A’s in AP and generally difficult classes, I have a bunch of various EC’s in sports, music, and leadership positions. I have achieved quite highly in math, my favorite subject, with math competitions and independent studies in collegiate math. Essays and recs will be solid. Additionally, I am quite good at cooking scrambled eggs, can function well on little to no sleep, and have 7 cats whose names I never learned.

Anyway, here is a list of characteristics that I’d like in a college, roughly ordered by importance.

Needs:
Strong mathematics program (math is far and away my biggest academic passion)
Strong general STEM (i would like options if I decide not to study solely mathematics)
Strong financial aid (i will need a lot of financial aid to attend college, schools that are need-blind and offer 100% demonstrated need are awesome, also ones that offer lots of merit aid)
Northeastern US (i live a few hours north of Boston and would like to be within at most a 10 hour drive from home)

Big Wants:
Medium size (ideal size is 5k-9k undergrads and 1k-3k grads, also would be alright with some LACs if they meet other categories)
Suburban (i dislike the big city, as I spend a lot of time among the trees, but i have lived in the middle of nowhere my whole life and would like to branch out a bit, be in a nice-sized college town with a major metropolitan center within 45ish minutes)
Undergraduate focus (no point in going to a prestigious university if i don’t get a good education out of it, i’d like the school to put focus on undergraduates)
Potential for research (this is mainly why I’d like a small graduate program, so I can get undergrad focus while still having the potential to help out with research)
Generally happy students (i am going to college to learn but also to experience, high student happiness from good dining hall food, lots of on-campus events, club sports, music opportunities, etc. would be quite nice)

Little Wants:
Diversity (fosters a better learning environment)
No religious affiliation (i am an atheist, but if there was an affiliation that didn’t severely affect the environment i would be fine with it)
Liberal-leaning (i am a steadfast liberal so i’d feel out of place in a conservative environment but i’d like to avoid a hyper-liberal echo chamber kind of environment as diversity of opinion is very important for learning)
No Greek life (frats and sororities kinda freak me out, they seem super creepy, there can be some Greek life but i don’t want it to dominate the social scene)

Can’t wait to hear your ideas! Thanks for taking some time out of your busy day to read my nonsense.

2

Wellesley (can take classes at MIT. great undergrad experience)
Pomona College (excellent undergrad experience, with the resources of a large university because it is in the Claremont consortium, and you can take classes at any of the 5Cs).
Duke
Haverford (also part of a consortium. known for being pretty good in STEM among LACs)
Northwestern (great undergrad)
Caltech
Tufts (not the greatest math program, but pretty good too. you, as a high-achieving math major, may have good chances for admission there. also meets your other criteria).

3

bump

4

Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, Swarthmore, Tufts, Wesleyan, Rochester, Lehigh

5

I was looking for strong math departments with a research bent as well, so I took the number of students from each school that were awarded NSF research scholarships in math over the last 10 years (available on another CC thread) and divided it by the number of graduates each year. This NSF award is very difficult to get because it requires multiple faculty nominations and each nonimee is peer reviewed by the NSF committe in the same manner as faculty research papers. Normalizing the the absolute number of scholarships by the number of graduates helps to eliminate the bias inherent in survey based rankings such as US News.

Caltech is at the top via this metric, but unless you have your own private jet and runway, you are not going to get there in under 10 hours.

Using the driving time feature in Google maps as a rough guide to filter my list I came up with the following schools in rank order

Princeton
MIT
Harvard
Cornell
Williams, Yale
Oberlin,Tufts
Bryn Mawr
Dartmouth, RPI
Columbia
CMU, Boston College
UMass Amherst
Brown

I only included schools with 3 or more awards, but here are some smaller schools that got at least 1 award

Swarthmore -2
College of NJ -2
Wellesley -1
Olin - 1
Smith -1
Wesleyan -1
Amherst -1

Babson, Olin and Wellesley are in the same consortium located in a wealthy (and dry) suburb southwest of Boston.
Wellesley can also cross enroll at MIT, but travel time is much longer than Babson/Olin. Boston College is in an adjacent wealthy suburb a few miles closer to Boston and connected by a slow branch of the Boston subway to the financial and medical districts.

Tufts is located in a densely populated working class suburb northwest of Boston that has been gentrified by young professionals. It is adjacent to the Peoples Republic of Cambridge which houses both Harvard and MIT. All these schools are located on a faster branch of the Boston subway (i.e fewer stops) and they form the high tech district.

UMass Amherst, Amherst College and Smith are in the same consortium that forms its own “college town” in a liberal semi-rural area of mid to western Mass.

Williams is located in a beautiful but rural summer vacation district in western Mass.

Tufts, Bryn Mawr, Dartmouth, and Wesleyan all have relatively small, undergrad focused Math programs that also have small Phd programs. Of this group Tufts and Dartmouth offer the T&E portion of STEM. Tufts tends to be more interdisciplinary than Dartmouth with a lot of crossover between Math, CS, Econ, Bio and Engineering.

Dartmouth is super duper creepy when it comes to frats, so that probably won’t be a good fit.

Boston College had some religous overtones that my kids were not comfortable with, but many people are fine with it, so you should check it out for yourself.

The area surrounding Tufts may be too dense for you, so you need to check that out. There is a state forest a couple of miles away though, and my daughter used to go hiking there for an escape. There is a very active Mountain Club there as well that maintains a lodge up in the White Mountains and provides shuttle vans for transportation.

I don’t know much about Bryn Mawr (I was surprised to see it had a Phd program) - so someone else will have to help there.

Oberlin, Tufts, Wesleyan and Brown are all very liberal, with Tufts tending to be more “hands on”, “inclusive” and “fun-loving” than Wesleyan or Brown (due to its Universalist roots). I don’t know that much about Oberlin.

Tufts and Brown have a reputation as “happy” campuses.

Tufts attracts a fairly large population of cat lovers due to it’s Vet School (which is located in central Mass). This may be a plus or minus depending on the reason why you don’t know your cat’s names…

Admission to Tufts apears somewhat random, but the fact that at least one of the admissions officers has raised the scrambled egg to the level of “holy” should work in your favor.
http://admissions.tufts.edu/blogs/jumbo-talk/post/sunday-brunch-the-fault-in-our-stars-and-the-holy-scrambled-egg/

6

How advanced in math will you be when you graduate from high school?

7

Thanks everyone! @ucbalumnus I am taking an independent study in differential equations senior year. I took Calc BC freshman year, which I received a 5 on, and I did an independent study in linear algebra sophomore year.

8

Since you will be very advanced in math, you should consider schools where the math department has graduate level math courses and research opportunities (a few LACs like Harvey Mudd have such math departments, but many do not). You will probably be taking (typically smaller) junior and senior level math courses in frosh year, so you will leave behind the larger frosh and soph level math courses shared with students of other majors.

You may want to consider what other STEM subjects are your possible interest. Students strong in math often get interested in statistics, physics, computer science, or economics (economics is a social science, but makes heavy use of math and statistics). Biology may be less common among such students, even though it is the most popular STEM major.

On-line course catalogs can give you an idea of what the school offers, and on-line schedules can give you an idea of how often each course is offered (and often how large it is).

Use the net price calculator on each school’s web site to get financial aid estimates. Note: if your parents are divorced or separated, many colleges require both of their income and asset information – check if the school requires the CSS Noncustodial Profile or similar.

At http://www.collegedata.com , the entry for each college includes a “Campus Life” tab. The information under it may include the percentage of students in sororities and fraternities. This may help you avoid schools like Dartmouth that have heavily sorority and fraternity centered student life.

9

Harvey Mudd is at the top along with Cal Tech according to the NSF award metric, but I did not include it as it has the same problem meeting your driving time metric as Cal Tech.