USC is my DD dream school if she gets enough merit money to attend. She has stats in the top 25% of the admited students. She wants to spend this summer doing research. She got admited to two research programs. One is very selective research program MSU HSHSP. It takes only about 24 out of 350 applicants and few 2400 SAT students reported that they did not get in. The program is full time residential 7 week in length. Also she got into USC Young Researchers program. This program is for one month and only 15 hours per week. I can’t find any information about the quality of this program.
I think she should go to the Michigan 7 week program. Its rigorous and will help here stand apart from other applicants. She can use what she learns from that experience in her essays.
Be SURE she completes her USC application no later than Dec 1, in order to qualify for merit $$.
Did she take the PSAT and does her score qualify her for NMSF in her state?
The one thing I’d add in looking over a post like this is that you are narrowly focusing on numbers. Dr. Nikias (USC president) has said in many of his speeches and appearances that they reject X number of students with perfect numbers because, as he says, they are looking for TROJANS. Put differently, my parents always said when I was growing up that Harvard doesn’t necessarily want the valedictorian, they want the captain of the football team.
You have to have the numbers of course, but I’d also think about whatever opportunities your daughter has had for community service and leadership - experiences that round her out as a person, rather than being an academic robot. One of my best friends is a hotshot corporate lawyer nowadays, and some of the most incompetent lawyers he’s ever seen have come out of Harvard and Yale, because they are bookworms / eggheads who are completely incapable of functioning in the real world. This is the flip side of what William Deresiewicz, the longtime Ivy League professor, wrote about in his infamous essay The Disadvantages of an Elite Education, and in his recent book Excellent Sheep, about the kinds of students coming out of top schools nowadays.