My daughter is in 11th grade and we’re thinking about college applications but would really appreciate some direction or advice as to where she should be looking. Some background:
- She’s a US citizen but we have lived overseas almost all her life. She’ll likely attend college in the USA. The UK is a possibility as well, although much less likely.
- She’s attending an American curriculum high school. Her grades are OK but nothing stellar. Unweighted GPA will probably be 3.6-3.7 although I think her schools grading is quite tough. She currently has one AP completed (score 5) and is taking 3 more this year and 3 more in 12th grade. I know SAT seems to becoming less relevant but she recently sat the March test. She doesn’t have results yet but based on practice tests is looking at around 1470-1510. Math is likely to be 780-800, reading / reasoning 680-710.
- Her extra curriculars are decent but not fantastic. She’s been quite involved in theatre and is also takes vocal training outside of school. Actually this is an area of interest for her: her voice teacher who also teaches at the local music conservatory has mentioned that he thought she should consider becoming a professional (much to the horror of both her parents!) She was one of only two gold medalists in a recent city-wide competition (and it’s a very big city.)
- Personality wise, she’s a quiet kid who keeps her feelings hidden and takes quite a while to open up and make friends. However, she does get on well with people and has a lovely quirky sense of humor, although you wouldn’t pick up on this until you’d known her quite a while. She also doesn’t push herself forward, even if it means losing out on what she really wants. I think she’ll take a while to adjust wherever she goes to but she is nonetheless reasonably adaptable.
- She’s not really sure what she wants to do when she leaves school. She absolutely 100% definitely doesn’t want anything involving humanities in any shape or form. At this stage she seems quite interested in biology as a major. She has some interest attending medical school if she does well at college. (I also think she’d make a great engineer but she doesn’t seem interested in that at all, possibly having had bad experiences in group projects at school where as the quiet girl she gets edged out by the loud boys.)
She’d also be interested in continuing her voice training if possible although that isn’t an absolute priority. - For the purposes of this discussion, let’s be optimistic and assume that there are no cost constraints.
So Collegeconfidentialers, do you have any advice where she should be thinking of applying – both reaches and safeties? We really have very little idea and would love some advice.
