Why does another of your threads state that you have 2 800 SAT IIs and a 2400 (which I assume would be preferable to a 35 ACT)
Because, based on practice SAT’s and SAT 2’s that I was taking at the time, I assumed I would get a 2400 and two 800’s. I wanted to see how strong of an applicant you guys would think I was with those scores. It was a hypothetical but I never mentioned that because it would deter people.
To my credit, I almost got those scores (or equivalents) anyway.
So here’s some more advice, in the spirit of remaining positive. You are going to college, most likely a good one, if not a great one. Make the most of your time. Focus less on the objective factors and more on the “subjective experience”. I see from your posts that you switched high schools and skipped a grade early on. Your college peers will most like be a year or two older. Try not to “compete” but look for activities which incorporate collaboration. Find groups which offer a supportive structure. Don’t try to “prove yourself”, rather improve yourself. Search out expirences which broaden your interests. After college, coming from a top school with top grades will open the door at most firms. But your interview and resume will land the job. You’re smart and you’re funny. You will do well.
What kinds of things were you doing when you volunteered at the Senior Center?
“The purpose of this thread is to present a counterargument to the CC establishment. Shotgunning is not an irrational college spree, but rather a reasoned approach for those who aren’t necessarily blissfully in love with a few specific schools, or for those who do not have the time, energy, or money to tour the nations visiting colleges.”
Instead of visiting, to help shorten that list, they choose to spend
time
energy
and
money
shooting in the dark.
Got it. :-?
“Against my better judgment – I’ll take the bait. I teach writing – no one, anywhere, can write 50 strong essays in 7 days.”
I agree. And I also teach writing, including to those who announce that they are very good writers but are not.
Well, I suppose even good writers can use instruction to improve.
Would y’all been happier if the OP organized his list like this:
High reaches: Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, Northwestern, Princeton, Stanford, U Chicago, U Penn, Yale.
Reaches: Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Notre Dame, U Chicago, U Mich, Vanderbilt, William and Mary.
Target: Indiana Bloomington, Lehigh, NYU Stern, U Pitt, UNC Chapel Hill, UVA,
Comfort: Fordham, Rutgers, Villanova, George Washington,
Reach LAC: Amherst, BC, Williams
Outliner target: Colorado School of Mines
Understand? Heavy on the high reach and reach. The target and comfort make sense given his scores Tossed in some meet-needs LACs and a wildcard.
I’ll be interested to see how this works out for you. How do you plan to do so many visits in April, and won’t it be very expensive since you can’t plan your flights? How will you manage your school work and keeping up your grades with lost time in April visiting, hopefully, many schools? I am not asking as counterarguments… I am genuinely interested.
I am doing the same thing as OP because I honestly don’t have the resources to visit many colleges either. Though I didn’t apply to anywhere near 30 schools, just 15 and I spend a considerable amount of time and effort on each supplement.
My parents are basically saying “apply wherever you want to, disregarding the financial costs for now. We’ll see where you get get accepted and what financial aid packages you get, and start visiting the final choices based on that.”
I think it makes sense but to each their own opinion.
I’m also very interested to know how things end up for you! I think it’s great as long as you didn’t wing every application. What are your stats anyway?
@epiphany Ummm, okay… Well let’s see, if I wanted to visit UVA, Georgetown, and GW for instance let’s just calculate how much that would be. Flight round-trip to DC 2 tickets: ~700, Hotel three nights: ~500, Food/dining/miscellaneous: ~200. Instead of spending three days and upwards of $1,500 to visit and confirm several of my colleges, I chose to pay $200 in application fees and spend a few hours writing essays. /
@momneeds2no I think I would move U Pitt and Indiana down to comfort, and UNC and UVA up to low reaches. Other than that thanks that chart actually helped me too, never thought of ranking them like that.
@1203southview Well I certainly won’t visit ALL of them because presumably I won’t get accepted to all of them. I’ll research the ones that I get accepted to in-depth first, find the ones I think I would like (probably top 3 or 4), and then I will visit them during spring break which happens to be in April.
@HopefulBadgerPlz My stats are here (http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/17962685) – heyy chance me maybe?? 
Those are all my finance schools there btw.
Since u you have the profile to be a viable candidate, I don’t consider it to be “shotgunning”.
I’m glad you got it all done. For some people, it would have been very difficult to do all of those apps in a short period of time. Every time you do an application, there is that possibility of some mistake or complication occurring. With as many schools as you did, you might have some issues that you have to address, just because these things happen. And to juggle that many apps in such a short period of time adds the risks for most people too.
My son filled out 6 EA applications, He figured those were pretty much match and safeties, and he would have those out of the way by the end of October, got some free apps out of half of them, and one was a state school so that cost of that was low. He learned a lot as he wrote his essays, and selected essays he’d written for practice the previous year, and putting together his apps. He also learned more about the schools the way he went through the process as he also got feed back on some of them from others who knew the schools well. It was a slow process and a painful one, but was truly his best effort. If were deferred from the more selective of them, he would know better where he stood in the college process. He was a much more skilled applicant to hit the next batch of application that he was ready to tackle.
The process also made him so much more aware of things, so that he started mulling over the schools that were really a jumble made into a list that were highly selective. He decided that he really did like one enough to apply ED, and wrote the app for it, deciding to eshew one EA app that had restriction,requesting to make it RD.
When you allow time, one’s experiences permeate and because you are young and your brain is growing ever so quickly, you really learn things, and come to conclusions that are not there at the onset. He spent a lot of time on his ED app, incorporating a lot of the languages and things that he now knew from those half dozen other apps he had put together. Talked to his teachers and GC with recs, asking if they would add some thing for this first choice school. He was able to craft a application that there was no way he could have done when he started the process. He figured that if he got into this school, he would be elated and set. If not, he’d then enter a "shot gun’ process simiar to what you did, but with no safety schools needed since one of the 6 EA or early notification schools would have that category taken care of. Only schools he would much prefer over the EA accepts were on the list
Again, with the additional finesse he had acquired from yet another app, the ED app, he started slowly and carefully choosing reach schools, and crafting their apps.
He got a very quick response from some EA schools that included some terrific scholarships, opportunies that he felt made one of them his first choice school if the ED school were out of the picture So that ended his app process. he was thrilled with the stiuation and it was all done in a very short period of time. The rest of his EA schools also had great news for him, and he was accepted ED as well End of the process for not so much money at all, and not a lot of stress as it was spread out over time.
I do not believe he would have gotten into his ED school RD, or if that were the first app he wrote, as he was really on the edge of being in the 25% top percentile test wise, and was really not a remarkable candidate though an excellent student. In the top 10% of his class, but not 5%, not a lot of APs, no SAT2s, just ACTs, no strong hook or legacy, just a BWRK. The app had to present him VERY well, and he needed top directed recs from GC and teachers, and killer essays, that made his app package very tight and directed. He needed to know the school and taken his strengths and direct them to what the school wanted. There is no way he could have done this in a shot gun approach His app almost certainly would stand out over someone who put together the apps that way. Having gone through this process so many times, I can say he had an A+ app that showcased him absolutely the best way it could. Still at highly selective schools that might not be quite enough, as he had no hook and he was not the very top of the top. The app had to grab the adcom’s attention.
Can you list your schools in order of preferance? Do you need financial aid? Does cost of the school enter the picture at all (such as Fordham at $35K vs BC at $65K)?
Chalk it up to personal philosophy. You like yours. Good. You are the one doing the apps and living through the experience.
Our ds took the approach of investigating schools prior to applying or filling out the application early and then spent time making direct contact. That meant reading about the depts, running NPC, comparing 4 yr sequences, ability to double/triple major, acceptance of transfer credit (he had already completed 5 of the physics classes required for a physics major, plus all of the math required.) The NPC eliminated a lot of schools before he even started filling out applications. He applied to a few of the out of price range schools if they had highly competitive full-ride offers and completed that process.
For places we couldn’t afford to travel, if he was seriously interested in the program, he made contact with the dean of the dept. He sent them the info they requested for determining of courses would transfer in, etc. Asked questions about undergrad research, ability to take grad level courses as an undergrad, etc. Before he even received his final packages, he already pretty much knew where he wanted to attend b/c he had spent umpteen hours investigating what was important to him. He had eliminated several schools before he even heard back.
Criteria for why a school is selected varies from student to student. There are kids out there that apply to only 1 school and never think twice about other places. They are accepted and go, thrive, love the experience, graduate, and have a great career. There is nothing “wrong” with that approach either.
To each their own. If you have no financial limitations and your parents are on board with you applying everywhere, it really doesn’t matter what anyone on CC thinks. Only you, your parents, and admission committees matter. And really, what the admission committee thinks of your essays and LOR are the likely make or break deal. Test scores and course lists are flat. Essays and LOR are the only real dimensional factors they have (unless you managed to interview for that many schools in that short time span as well.)
@GMTplus7 He IS shotgunning, even if viable. Every school that he gets into that he has no intention of going to, he is depriving another person, who perhaps really wanted to get into that school, of that admission slot. He can only go to one school! What does he come out of this with? Bragging rights. “I got into 25 top schools. WooHoo.” Why do I have the feeling that had OP been 15 years older and completed his finance degree, he would have been first in line to sell the real estate derivatives that nearly brought down our economy?
I’m not being snarky here. Everything OP is doing is “legal” just as the bankers operated within the technicalities of the law 7 years ago. But it is just such a lousy way to approach anything.
I insisted my D visit every school she intended to apply to. We visited 20. (Spent about the same amount of money that OP has.) Eleven of those looked great on paper, but turned out to not be good fits. She applied to 9 that she would be very happy attending. She has heard from 4 so far, all with very good merit scholarships. Through the process one has emerged as her most favored choice. She has been back 2 additional times for a visit, has met with several professors there and has gotten to know some students during the overnight. Is this a better approach? I think so. She has learned someting about proper due diligence, thoroughly researching her investment, and actually meeting face to face with people.
^^appling to a large number of schools is not greedy or morally off base.
Very few kids can visit every school (20) they “intend to apply to”. Especially when schools are out of state. You are very lucky that she could miss days of school and you could miss work and had the finances to visit 20 schools. Our family’s out of state visits averaged $350 per visit (air, rental car , hotel) Why not save that $$ and visit admitted schools.
20 visits 7,000 k and 9 apps 450 = 7450
v.
0 visits 0k and 20 apps 1,000 = 1000
^also, it does not mean rejects for other students… he can only occupy one space. The ten or so other schools he might get into and doesn’t attend will be filled by other students. Those students would have been deferred and waitlisted.
But at many schools not visiting will hurt his application chances. Interviewing and attending local info sessions help compensate.
Doesn’t seem as if he’s worried about a “top choice” (a useless concept by-the-way).
@1203southview @momneeds2no I was just going to say exactly that.
@momneeds2no Not visiting would only hurt my application chances at some of my targets - namely Lehigh. Ivy’s and other top schools don’t care about demonstrated interest.