Who said you should apply to as many top colleges as possible to improve your chances of getting in? That is flat-out wrong. That is why every year in early April you will see a whole lot of new threads entitled “why didn’t I get in anywhere?” from very high stats students who only applied to top colleges, but didn’t apply to any safeties, or if they did applied to one or two, neither of which they really liked. My kid’s friend just got rejected from 12 top colleges, and was only accepted to her two safeties.
I wish you luck, but I am concerned when I read that you are going to apply to one or two safeties. What about match schools? A 36 ACT or 1600 SAT is no guarantee of anything. I would say that for a school with around at least a 25% acceptance rate, very high grades and test scores could be considered a match. NOT a safety. With acceptance rates less than that, no on can consider a school a match or safety.
I see no need to retake a 34 ACT. That is a great score and getting a 35 or 36 isn’t going to make a difference. At the top schools, course rigor, recs, ECs, essays, grades, those are the things that make the difference.
You should reach out to @Baloney1011. Against the advice of CC members he/she shotgunned your list plus all the Ivy League schools plus just about every other top 30 school in the US.
The strategy apparently flopped as @Baloney1011 was later back on CC seeking advice on how to transfer out of his/her safety school.
Nothing wrong with Fordham -we loved it when we looked at it. I suspect this shotgunner was/is dissatisfied with Fordham because he/she knew very little about it going in.
Here’s another view of Stanford reconstructed from my (Stanford-attending) friend’s teary 4 am drunk calls of regret:
At Stanford everyone is so wrapped up in their own self image they don’t care about anything else, let alone their classes or learning. People just want to impress some startup or investment bank or law school so they can go on to make as much money as possible. It is a giant competition of shallowness, and, worse, it’s a silent one, so you can never exactly pinpoint the problem. Lots and lots of people are miserable and feel totally inadequate from being surrounded by so many people who try to appear as glamorous as possible all the time, but it is taboo to mention it because then you’ll appear like you don’t have your life together, and everyone else, who secretly feels the same way, will turn on you to feel better about themselves. On weekends, everyone drinks away their problems so they stop feeling this way. If you don’t want too, good luck - the pressure to drink is huge, just another part of the collective delusion of how you should act and seem. Want to leave? There’s nothing out there. Palo Alto is a boring pressure cooker where high schoolers kill themselves because Stanford is down the road.
I don’t necessarily think this is any more of an accurate perception than the beautiful, sunny, perfect Stanford of high schooler’s dreams. But I think lots of people fall more in love with their image of Stanford than Stanford itself. Step back, look at Stanford for what it is, not for what you want it to be, and think very hard about whether you actually love Stanford or love their marketing materials.