<p>Hi, I am a current junior at a large public school in new york. I am looking for some suggestions for colleges that would be a good fit. i have a 4.0 gpa, weighted, and am ranked about 8th in my class of about 325. This year, my average is about a 97 wtd. I am taking AP US, symphonic band ( the bad one) French IV, Advanced Precalc, AP Physics AP English, sculpture and scripywriting.I was a founding member of my schools debate club, and am a two time state qualifier as well as a national championship qualifier. I love cross country, and am my schools MVP, although I am not a recruit for D1 or 2. I also served on a varsity sport leadership council. I have played the flute for 8 years, and am also involved with Math League and am a trial attorney for the Mock Trial Team. Last summer I was the fundraising coordinator for a local charity 5k, and this spring I will be volunteering with Go Girl Go, which teaches elementery school aged kids healthy living. hopefully i will also serve with the SCA this summer. I held two jobs last summer, although neither had very many hours. I would like to major in environmental science and economics. My sophmore year I scored a 207 on the psat and this year a 209. the lack of improvement is depressing, I know. hopefully I will do well on the SAT/ACT. I am looking for a liberal arts college, preferably in the Northeast, with a beautiful campus, strong graduation rates, and a high returning rate for freshman. Merit scholarships are important, because I will not qualify for need based aid, but my twin sister and I are both going to college at the same time, so it will be very hard financially. I love Wellesley and Cornell, but because I don't have stellar ECs and volunteering, they are reach schools. I am looking at Boston Colege, SUNY Geneseo, Bowdoin, St Michaels and a few others. I think a medium size school would be the best setting, and it would be nice to be in a thriving town/city. all suggestions are welcome!! also, please ignore my poor spelling/capitalization because my autocorrect isnt working.</p>
<p>thriving town/city? that rules out New England and much of the country 
but serially there are a ton of colleges to choose from. I suggest you run the SuperMatch in the column on the left of this page. I like your ECs. I think them at least as strong as your GPA. Provide for us please your unweighted GPA if you know it and your class rank, too. In what would you like to major. Let us know what the SuperMatch kicks out.</p>
<p>I suppose i use “thriving” loosely- really anywhere with a quaint town, or, you know, within an hour or two away from a Target! Unweighted GPA is about 95 or 96, and my class rank would be the top 5%, ish. The Super match came out with Upenn, Amherst, Middlebury, Williams, Brandeis, Colgate, Bowdoin Swarthmore and a few others. I’ve heard of some of these, but don’t really know much about them. They also all appear to be really expensive.</p>
<p>Don’t throw away your old and new lists just yet. Get your parents’ most recent tax form (if 2013 isn’t ready yet, use the 2012) and sit down with them and run the net price calculator for several of these schools. Show your parents what the schools expect you to pay to go there after grant aid. It will probably surprise them. So talk to them about how much money they have set aside or are able to offer you to pay for college each year. This will give you some idea of which colleges you can afford to start looking at. Don’t think that merit is going to make all that big a difference if your family income is above 70K. Only full tuition merit has much effect upon the middle and upper middle class family, since merit of 20K is going to go to pay off the student loans they offer you, the work study, the grant aid, and only then is it applied to the costs of attendance. Until you know what your parents can afford to provide you, you cannot know where you can apply.</p>
<p>If you liked Wellesley, consider Smith and Mount Holyoke (both are women’s colleges and part of the 5-college consortium along with Amherst College.) The geographic are is gorgeous, and Mount Holyoke, in particular, has an unbelievably beautiful campus. Smith is right in town, and the other schools are nearby with a free bus. Northampton is a really cool town with shops and restaurants, and a “strip” with Target, etc etc etc. Wellesley was my D’s reach school (she was waitlisted) and she applied to Mount Holyoke, Smith, Bard College, Skidmore, and Hampshire College. All small, liberal, LACs. She would have also applied to Bates College, here in Maine, but it was too close to home and too much like her high school.</p>
<p>Bowdoin is probably going to be as hard or harder to get into as Wellesley, but a beautiful, great school within easy driving distance of Portland, Maine, which is an AMAZING small city. Colgate is also very pretty, but super isolated. I went there and transferred out. Bard College is also pretty isolated. </p>
<p>What do you want to study in college, any idea yet? Do you prefer a more conservative or more liberal school? More liberal-artsy-intellectual or more pre-professional? Greek life?</p>
<p>I agree with the poster, above, that you should run the Net Price Calculators for all schools on your list. Many of them are “meet full need” schools. I found the easiest way to do that is to open an account on Big Future (the College Board site) and log in when you run the first NPC (don’t click “guest”). Then the next time you run a NPC for another school, all that information will be pre-filled and you won’t have to type it in again. it’s much less tedious this way! This is a really important step, though. My D was surprised by some of the results, which eliminated some of the schools on her original list and added others she hadn’t considered as strongly.</p>
<p>Good luck :)</p>
<p>Be aware that the Ivy League and NESCAC schools (including Cornell, Amherst, Williams, Middlebury, Bates and Bowdoin) do not give merit scholarships. Neither does Wellesley. All financial aid at these schools is need based.</p>
<p>If you can work out the finances Bates might be a good target school. Extremely strong and inclusive debate. No tryouts, no cuts, yet the school ranks 5th in the nation, ahead of schools like Stanford, Princeton and Brown. </p>
<p>Div. III Xcountry, higher admit rate than many of the schools on your list. Not a shoo-in, and not in a great city, but worth a look.</p>
<p><a href=“Bates debate ranks fifth in nation, including key win at Yale Inter-Varsity Tournament | News | Bates College”>http://www.bates.edu/news/2013/10/31/bates-debate-rank-fifth-nation/</a></p>
<p>Thank you so much sue22 and staceyneil! I’ve also heard that that the New England area is quite beautiful. Stacyneil, where did your daughter end up going? I am interested in studying environmental science, preferably for an environmental law or policy career. I lean liberal, but would prefer an environment with a fair amount of diversity, political, racial and otherwise. I am not at all a “partyer” but I’d like my undergrad experience to be a bit more “artsy intellectual” rather than high stress pre professional. I signed up for a college board account with the net price calculator, but it required a lot of specific information that I did not know.
I would be willing to go to a “safety” school if it meant graduating with less debt, and I know a lot of my top choices are by no means cheap.
I did look at Bates, and it seems like a very good fit, especially considering the debate team and that it is in a picturesque part of Maine ( so I’ve heard).</p>
<p>I think you should definitely look into Mount Holyoke (that is where my D is going, although she is also still on the waitlist for Wellesley, which some people describe as more intense and pre-professional, I think.) Mount Holyoke is INCREDIBLY diverse. My D has been spending all her free time on the “Accepted Students Class of 2018” facebook page and she’s always talking about the amazing women she is meeting from literally ALL over the world. It is incredible (and the polar opposite of Bates, which is much more homogenous.) Also, if this matters, Holyoke is one of the few schools in these lists that does offer some merit aid.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>Colorado College is not in the NE, but has a program that is in line with what you want:
<a href=“https://www.coloradocollege.edu/academics/curriculum/catalog/departmental/environmentalprogram.dot”>https://www.coloradocollege.edu/academics/curriculum/catalog/departmental/environmentalprogram.dot</a></p>
<p>Its Cost of Attendance (tuition, fees, room and board, living expenses) is 60k, its top scholarship seems to be 10k/year and you can take out about 5k-7k/yr in govt loans, so if you work for your living expenses just during the year (say 4k/year), your parents will need to write a check for ~40k every year. </p>