Free ride maybe…but full ride connotates merit.
Wish I read this last year haha.
Good post OP, wishing you the best.
@Hamlin Thank you, it means a lot.
@lookingforward The reason why I claimed to be “too focused on the prestige of school” was because I spent much of my free time reading up on the subcategory “Chance Me.” Every student who posts on the page seems to have done miraculous things, such as “I built my own nuclear reactor.” It really began to depress me. I began to look at my class rank and GPA as nothing special, but average. Because I had not done anything completely spectacular such as that, I simply felt so far behind everyone else. It was as if I was falling behind in a race of success(obviously, I was taking this way out of perspective). I had an overwhelming sense that if I didn’t get into an Ivy League, I had ultimately failed at high school. On top of this, all my classmates expect me to attend a school like Harvard. There are students who I pass by everyday in the halls who continuously ask “Hey, when does your Harvard acceptance letter come in?” I’m being held to a standard that just isn’t in my power to control. I want other students to realize that the Ivy League schools are NOT the only schools where you can succeed in and after you graduate.
What part of single-digit admit rates was unclear to you?
Well, OP, you’ve now ascended the CC space-time plane and entered the world of realism. This website is (statistically) heavily biased towards those people who cure death and develop hyperspace travel at the age of 3. You make a really good point that for 1) this website can be horridly depressing and 2) there are a lot of good schools, not just Ivies. It’s just that CC has this stigma (in some parts of the website) against any school that doesn’t have a single digit admissions rate.
I wish you the best, congrats, and nice post!
@Merppity , I like your post, but disagree when you say CC is biased towards top 20 colleges. You need to qualify that by saying that it is the typical high-achieving CC student who is obsessed with those schools. Since I started using CC almost two years ago, I would say the all the senior contributors and 99.9% of parents using this site are decidedly in favor of non-top 20 schools. If it weren’t for this site, I wouldnt have learned about at least 6 of the colleges my kid ended up applying to. I am grateful for this site:-)
The impression I get from reading through topics is that students often put themselves in a binary situation. They will either attend one of a set of ultra-selective schools or, if not that, one that is not particularly selective at all. Accomplished students certainly have more options than this, but it’s the very quest for prestige that tends to make these – sometimes prestigious – options ultimately unavailable.
Fortunately, in this case, UW is an excellent school that seems to suit the OP well.
I might sound stupid but what does OP stand for? Sorry, I’m kind of new to this site.
The original poster.
People are notoriously bad at dealing with small numbers. Take for example the number of people who are more afraid of flying vs. car travel or the number of people who are more afraid of the incredibly rare side effects of vaccines vs. the harms of the diseases they prevent.
@Komz1304 OP = original poster (the person who starts the thread).
@merc81 @iwannabe_Brown Thank you. 
@GMTplus7 I understood that the top 15 schools are very hard to into. However, as stated by people above, I was too focused on this website before I truely started to delve into the actual numbers. A majority of people who post on this website are aiming for the Ivy’s and other top schools. It made it seem as if your typical smart student will get into an Ivy.
“It made it seem as if your typical smart student will get into an Ivy.”
Not only that, it makes it seem as if you’re required to cure at least 2 forms of cancer before you get your “typical smart student” certification.
Yeah. Like people have said, even the smartest of the smart, the cancer curing students will still have a hard chance of getting into Ivies. And like it’s been said, people are bad with small numbers; why do you think so many people buy lottery tickets? On this site, the high achieving students tend to believe that the only way to succeed is to get into a top 20 school, when there are plenty of other very good options available.
I’m lucky I’m more into engineering, where the best schools aren’t Ivy League. My mom & dad also both went to unknown schools for undergrad, and then UCSD for medical school. So I guess it depends what you want to do. If it’s more science and engineering, the best place to go probably isn’t the Ivy league, but whatever is best in what you want to do. My grandma always said “Bloom where you are planted,” I guess I believe that. Do the best wherever you go and you will be fine.