Advice to rising senior on elite school apps

Congrats on your accomplishments! Make sure you apply early or rolling to your state flagship and if it has a honors college/program do that as well. Agree with above posters that say go with fit on REA or ED (MIT effectively becomes REA relative to other REA schools like HYPS).

How dead set are you on CS/EE? Do you want to be in a STEM focused environment or are you looking to explore? It sounds like @hebegebe’s kid has the best of both worlds. I’d say the same thing for Stanford out of your initial list.

The good thing about Stanford REA is that they reject most and defer very few. If you are in the defer pile, it means your app is very strong and you should have confidence that you will be competitive anywhere else. Harvard historically has deferred most of its REA applicants (78% this past cycle), so you have no clue where your app stands.

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