What Should My Safeties Be?

<p>Hi,</p>

<p>I'm a homeschooled UK student already applying to:</p>

<p>Reaches/Matches - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, Caltech, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, New York, Williams, Middlebury, Dartmouth, and Amherst. </p>

<p>I'm also applying to Cambridge, Warwick, Imperial, and LSE; the last two are pretty much safeties, as due to the nature of my qualifications, I'm probably more geared towards getting into a UK university.</p>

<p>I want to study business or finance-oriented math; which safeties (US colleges) should I pick?</p>

<p>Shouldn’t you put your stats up?</p>

<p>I like your schools but NYU doesn’t give ANY aid to international students, and they don’t offer fee waivers to us either. You said you needed aid, right?</p>

<p>Oh… thanks for telling me. NY’s quite expensive to live in, isn’t it?</p>

<p>I haven’t taken the SAT or SAT Subject Tests yet (although I got 720 CR, 680 Writing, 780 Math on a test paper), but, for what it’s worth, here are my current qualifications:</p>

<p>3 As at A-level: Maths, Further Maths, and Physics
Achieved highest mark in two Open University qualifications in genetics and cosmology</p>

<p>I’m planning to take the SAT I, SAT Math II, Lit, Biology, World History, and Chemistry, later this year. Since I’m homeschooled, I figured that this would be the best way to show the breadth of my knowledge.</p>

<p>Also, I’m not one of the “bread-and-butter” students with 10 APs and a bunch of extracurriculars and stuff. I’m doing some CS research, I’m trying to start my own business, and get a novel published. I have no idea whether standing out so much will help or hurt my admissions chances. But we’ll see, I guess.</p>

<p>My friend who also wants to study business is looking at Purdue, Northeastern, George Mason, UMich (although I wouldn’t say that’s safety-level exactly, two of the best-on-paper girls in our school got rejected there this year), Illinois Wesleyan and University of Bridgeport. Have you tried the matchmaker thingy on collegeboard? It’s pretty cool, and since you’re looking for safeties you could click on colleges with the 50-75 percent acceptance rate instead of the below 50 one. Sorry I’m so little help!</p>

<p>Wow, that’s quite a lot of subject tests.</p>

<p>Well, I contacted the adcoms, and they said that since I haven’t yet taken any standard tests in subjects like Chemistry, good SAT II scores should suffice. Besides, tests are kind of my forte - the recommendations and so forth will be the hardest thing to get, for me.</p>

<p>I’ll try the CollegeBoard tool; thanks for the heads-up :)</p>