Thank you, everyone, for all the help and attention!
I’ll try to get more responses from my parents next time. It’s a work in progress, that’s for sure. The whole applications journey is.
mimcinco: I would not consider a women’s college. I don’t really enjoy being singled out for my sex, either positively or negatively, and it’s definitely a choice that makes a statement to me… not a bad one, but not one that I’m interested in. Other preferences… urban/abundant public transportation (in the surrounding area itself) is good, as I can’t drive and dread learning. I’d prefer a minimum school size (at least eight hundred or so freshmen?) and don’t really care if it gets bigger. Around a thousand five hundred sounds good, and I don’t mind if there are significantly more than that. Probably a pretty liberal environment, but having lived in the Bible Belt for years, I mostly just need one that’s not extremely conservative. Similarly, I’m not religious, and not interested in religiously affiliated schools. … Other than that, not really sure what to mention?
Remember, there can be liberal schools in conservative regions and (less frequently) conservative schools in liberal regions. So you may not want to eliminate all schools in a region without checking on this aspect if that is why you want to leave the region.
That’s true–it still leaves the region itself, though, even if the immediate surrounding area is less conservative, and for leaving the south specifically, I have many more reasons for wanting to leave.
Try the University of Pittsburgh. It would be an academic safety for you, it’s strong in stem, very urban, and you should be in the running for very good scholarships. The only button it doesn’t push is being on the coast.
It should be irrelevant to applicants if a school is need aware or need blind. It doesn’t affect how much you like a school, it affects only the chances of admission, and then only for a few applicants on the cusp. If you like the school, apply! Meeting full need can be the critical issue.
lostaccount: Thank you! That’s the ideal, of course.
vonlost: Noted. I think for the hopes of finding safeties in particular, though, it can be an issue. I’m already planning on applying to plenty of schools with low admissions chances, so I’m not sure if applying to even more where they’ll lower my chances even more for circumstances I can’t change helps.
Every application helps your chance of admission to some school. If you apply to ten schools where your chance of admission is one in ten at each, you have a 35% chance of rejection by all of them. If you run out of application $, ask for waivers. This just illustrates the power of multiple applications.
That is only if the admission decisions are independent events. This is generally not true, due to similar credentials (e.g. courses, grades, test scores, extracurriculars) considered by the various colleges.
@vonlost: Your mathematical analysis is not correct. Your calculation is only valid if the admission events are independent, which they are not. This came up recently in another thread, and then a separate thread was started about it:
Otherwise I agree that in general additional applications help admissions chances, but one has to be smart about what schools one applies to, and what schools will be beneficial will be different for different people.
^ Yes, it’s a simplification assuming schools are not identical in the way they evaluate applicants, urging students to cast a wide net, and specifically to ignore the need aware/blind issue.
