California public school kid

Thank you for taking the time AustenNut. I think we are kind of thinking along similar lines. The one difference from a few months ago is that he is going to apply EA as BMus-Piano-Perf applicant (piano auditions will have an oversized impact on admission decision).

The repertoire requirements for pre-screening/audition are a subset of this bucket he is working on:

  1. Baroque - a Bach Well Tempered Clavier Prelude and Fugue
  2. Classical - a Beethoven Sonata all movements
  3. Virtuosic etude - one of Chopin’s Op 10 etudes
  4. Romantic era major piece - one of Chopin’s Scherzos
  5. Contemporary/modern - one of Kapustin’s short piece

The list is now based on schools which don’t mind their music kids double majoring.
EA Target - Indiana, Wisconsin, Texas, Illinois and UNC

Regular:
UC bucket target - Irvine and SB have good music performance major and don’t mind double major. Not sure about Davis and SD for his stats.
Target non-UC bucket - UWash (music + non-CS), Purdue (not music), UMD (music + non-CS)
Reach buckets - CMU, Michigan, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, UCSC, Rice, NYU (all have good music programs and encourage double major)
Safety - TBD (Minn, Utah etc. not thinking about this for now but we will start to expand once we have some feedback based on the pre-screen videos).

Kudos to the kids that have 3.97 unweighted and high SAT - that is near impossible in the ultracompetitive Bay Area public school my son goes to with 8-10 AP’s that many kids do.

Like some of you have said, this whole exercise is like flying blind - we just put the best foot forward with a healthy mix of schools and hope for the best. All of your inputs are quite helpful in getting grounded and have the right mindset.