Chance an aspiring biomedical researcher for LACs [3.93UW 1560 SAT]

Chance Me / Match Me
1

Demographics

US citizen

  • State/Location of residency: New York State
  • Type of high school (or current college for transfers): public highly competitive
  • Other special factors: legacy to duke?

Cost Constraints / Budget
No budget constraints/cost isn’t a factor

Intended Major(s)
molecular/cell biology or physics

GPA, Rank, and Test Scores
3.93UW GPA (by end of junior year)
no rank, no weighted
1560 composite SAT

List your HS coursework
highest rigor possible, school doesn’t offer APs, honors wherever possible

  • English: honors American lit
  • Math: will be doing equivalent of ap bc calc
  • Science: bio, chem, phys, then equivalent of ap phys 3?
  • History and social studies: equivalent of ap us history
  • Language other than English: equivalent of ap french

Awards
state speech & debate (top 5 in state), 3x state qualifier
national commended scholar (predicted–1460 psat)
2 research publications/present at intl conference
school honor roll
some french medals?
will be doing a bunch of science research comps but after college apps

Extracurriculars

  • stipended research intern at t3 (worked with testing novel alzheimers drugs, submitting to comps, designed project)
  • research intern at t10 (worked with EEGs, wrote research report, no pub)
  • national high school student leader t10 university exchange program (usually reserved for undergrads), lead investigator on awareness project that will be presented at the UN, on 2 publications related to this
  • captain of linguistics club and participated twice in national linguistics olympiad (was 13 points away from moving onto the qualifying round), volunteering related, maybe research paper
  • speech & debate – high regional rankings
  • art director for school’s art club, designed and digitized community murals
  • was head of costumes my sophomore year for my school’s theater department, spent over 200 hours creating and deisgning costumes as well as managing outfit changes
  • editor for my schools literary magazine, featured in it twice
  • art youtube channel where I do animations (lol)
  • taxidermy/dissection hobbyist (might write abt in essays)
  • passion project directing funding to science charities following funding cuts, should be able to get a couple thousands

Essays/LORs/Other
I’m not the strongest writer but I’m gonna start really early/pay a consultant lol

Schools

  • Assured (100% chance of admission and affordability):
  • Extremely Likely: suny bing, upitt, rutgers,
  • Likely: hamilton (based on scoir)
  • Toss-up: vassar, ucsd?, Hampshire, haverford
  • Lower Probability: duke? (might ED + legacy but obv still a high reach), cmu (not cs)
  • Low Probability: Cornell, Columbia, harvard, amherst, Dartmouth, swarthmore, pomona

match me with more LACs/smaller universities with good undergrad focus and research possibilities/phd placements!

2

Make sure to have 3, preferably four years of social sciences.

I’d say Hamilton goes with Vassar as a slight reach but Haverford a toss up and Hampshire a safety but odd choice.

If you want an LAC, why Duke or the Ivies.

If you study physics, I’d look at Arizona over Rutgers.

You might look at Grinnell as a target and Allegheny a safety. St Olaf can be another safety.

Good luck.

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i put it bc of its high biology PhD placement and as for duke/the ivies bc my parents are making me apply haha

tysm for ur advice! i was also rlly fond of grinnell idk why I didn’t put it
I have 4 years of both english/history

4

Don’t build a list solely because of PhD placement but you’re better off with a Kalamazoo type - and Hampshire has had financial difficulties.

Pick a place you can excel - not just because it’s on a list.

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I’m a little confused, so help me get some clarity on your plans.

  1. Your topic headline says “biomedical research”
  2. Your intended major says molecular/cell biology, which makes sense, or physics.

I don’t understand the choice of physics unless you’re interested in biomedical engineering as an option. If you are, then why not look directly in biomedical engineering as a possible major?

There are a few colleges which offer undergraduate degrees in Biomedical Sciences like St.Lawrence University, a very good small liberal arts college in Upstate New York. But certainly molecular biology would be a very strong major to prepare you for graduate school in this field.

Thoughts?

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I put physics because it interests me but most of my ECs/past experience are with biomedical stuff. I would like to keep my options open hence why I’m looking more into liberal arts colleges. Though number one interest is molecular biology.

Thank you so much!

7

So I think there is a lot to be said to going to an LAC with strong natural science departments if you are potentially interested in research.

Looking at your current list, I see some colleges like that, but not others I would think you might want to consider. I also see a variety of colleges I would not necessarily recommend.

Some to consider.

I think in the more Likely range, you should consider great academicky LACs like Kalamazoo, St Olaf, Earlham, and so on. Not only would these give you alternatives to the public research universities that currently dominate your Likelies, they might well offer you significant merit. Not that you have to entirely exclude universities, particularly if you get Honors offers. But I see no reason to limit yourself to them.

In the less likely range, Carleton and Grinnell are fairly obvious choices to strongly consider (and Grinnell might offer merit). I also wonder if you have considered Harvey Mudd.

Then more in the middle, I would suggest you check out Oberlin. A lot of people associate it with the Conservatory, but it is actually a really strong science LAC too, and again has merit.

I also wonder if you have considered William & Mary. Not an LAC, but unusually undergrad focused for a research university (newly an R1 in fact), and with some very strong departments. You might also be a candidate for the Monroe Scholarship, which has a lot of perks including a special research program, and apparently now also has a bigger financial component as well.

In terms of ones I would eliminate–I agree Hampshire is a very special case LAC. I’d have to be persuaded a person interested in LACs should also be applying to CMU–it has its strengths but I do not think of it as one of the research universities that provides a more LAC-like undergrad experience. UCSD, same deal, and I just think OOS it is a tough choice to justify at what it will cost you (in-state for undergrad, or for grad school, would be different questions).

Then sort of like with William & Mary, you might consider some Ivies and similar, but I am not sure your list is the one I would choose. Like Cornell and Columbia are not what I would consider more-LACish Ivies. Dartmouth for some people, but I would not normally pick it out given your academic interests.

Harvard and Duke perhaps. But I would more be thinking Brown (given its curriculum approach), and possibly Yale (not least because of its residential colleges). If you wanted more such universities to consider, I might suggest you check out Rice and WashU. Again, I am just thinking about universities that make sense to me for someone who would be cross-shopping LACs strong in natural sciences.

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I would also recommend checking out Rice and Wash U. Maybe Vanderbilt? They are not LAC’s but have that type of feel while still be very strong in the sciences.

If you are considering Speech and Debate in college, Rice has an excellent program!

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There are lots of good reasons to consider liberal arts colleges. Keeping your options open is one because it tends to be easier to switch majors at these schools than at big universities where there can be extra hurdles to jump over if you want to make changes. If you stick to the pure sciences, I don’t think that will be a problem anywhere.

For maximum flexibility, I suggest that you consider schools with an open curriculum, i.e. schools were there are few or no required core courses. You plan your own course of study and choose your own courses - in consultation with an advisor. These schools are most often small liberal arts colleges but there are also some smaller universities which have chosen this approach as well.

Here is a list of colleges (with acceptance rate in parentheses) all with an open or modified open curriculum all of which have a major in molecular biology and have varying levels of difficulty for admissions:

Wesleyan University, CT (16%) - even have a major called molecular biophysics
University of Rochester, NY (40%) - 9 different biology majors!
Brown, RI (6%)
Hamilton, NY (14%)
Colorado College, CO (18%)
Williams, MA (9%)

Two other excellent liberal arts colleges, also open curriculum schools, to consider, which do not offer a major in molecular biology but do offer majors in biochemistry in which some molecular biology is included, are:

Grinnell, IA (15%)
Vassar, NY (19%)

Thoughts?

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I would talk with the guidance counselors at your school in addition to looking at the Scoir data as the counselors are likely to know if there were any hooks on the Hamilton students that influenced the decisions (i.e. they applied ED, were recruited athletes, etc.) Same with Vassar and Haverford.

In looking at your list, Rutgers and UCSD are the biggest outliers, followed by CMU. These are some schools that seem to fit better with your list, to my mind:

  • SUNY Geneseo: About 3900 undergrads, 64% acceptance rate
  • St. Lawrence (NY): Seconding this school of about 2100 undergrads, 58% acceptance rate
  • Union (NY): About 2100 undergrads, 44% acceptance rate
  • Brandeis (MA): About 3700 undergrads, 35% acceptance rate
  • Bucknell (PA ): About 3800 undergrads, 32% acceptance rate

If you decide that more medium to medium-large schools are to your fancy, then I agree with the suggestion of Brown, and you may want to consider Case Western, Lehigh, Tufts, and U. of Rochester, as well.

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tysm for those options!

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Absolutely. Possibly Emory as well, and actually Emory has the Oxford option where you literally go to a LAC for a couple years but then finish at the main campus.

Those four colleges–Rice, WashU, Vanderbilt, and Emory–are sometimes kinda treated as a distinct peer group in my circles, and I think for good reasons. All of them are very wealthy research universities, all of them are constantly putting more of those resources into providing a high quality undergraduate experience, and I think for a kid who is maybe interested in some of the pros of the LAC-type experience but concerned about not having all the resources of a research university, they can kinda hit a sweet spot.

And then other kids would prefer a more “pure” version of one or the other (LAC or research university), and that is fine too.

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I say this a lot, but I note after visiting several colleges and researching many more with my S24, Rochester stood out as having one of my personal favorite curriculum structures. It isn’t quite totally open in that it has a very loose form of distributional requirement. But what I like so much is that you do that through choosing what they call clusters, which are thematically related courses:

And so although you have lots of lots of options for what your curriculum will look like, you will end up exploring a few different things in a little depth. And then in practice, sometimes those become minors or second majors or so on. Very cool.

This is not totally unique to Rochester, however. Like, WashU has a similar sort of concept in Arts & Sciences, what it calls Integrations:

Although that is just part of the overall curriculum structure there, it is also the case lots of WashU kids end up with interesting combinations of majors and minors.

Anyway, just something I wanted to point out, as I am personally fond of this concept of a flexible exploration in depth.

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I think a liberal arts college is ideal for exploring your interests, and you should be able to get an excellent education in the natural sciences and do research with no problem.

Please keep in mind that a plain vanilla biology major would serve you just as well as a cell/molecular biology major. If you choose cell and molecular classes for your biology electives, it will be the same thing as a cell/molecular major. The exact name on the degree doesn’t matter. Graduate programs will be admitting students from a variety of majors, since biomedical research is interdisciplinary (I’m a biomedical research professor).

A major in physics with a bio minor would be a neat combo too if you’d like to go more in that direction.

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Yes, @NiceUnparticularMan, I think that University of Rochester is one of the best academic bargains around. It is extremely well resourced with a top 50 endowment, has top faculty, is paired with an excellent research hospital, and has a conservatory. It is the rare research university that has a modified open curriculum. And despite being a research university, it is small enough as to not be overwhelming. And yet its acceptance rate is consistently in the 35-40% range. Maybe it’s the weather, but I don’t understand why applicants aren’t beating down the doors to go there.

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I do think it is basically a location thing, as in I have zero doubt if it was magically relocated to Boston, LA, or even Chicago, it would immediately start receiving many more applications and its acceptance rate would plummet. But instead it is in Upstate New York, and while I personally think Rochester is a pretty interesting city, and there is a lot of fun outdoor stuff to do nearby, I do think a lot of kids are just looking for a different location.

Indeed, they have a quite robust merit program, and I think it is not too cynical to suggest they basically need it to woo some of the kids they want away from more popular locations.

On the plus side, this means if you are really interested in a great academic experience at a nice overall college, and are NOT inclined to rule out a location like this, then with good enough numbers you may have a very good chance of admissions to Rochester, and indeed possibly merit.

As a result of all this, in my circles Rochester is a pretty popular Target, arguably sometimes Likely, with again that merit upside potential. And then many of those kids end up choosing another college in the end, but not all of them. And what seems clear is at least in our circles, as long as you do some basic demonstrated interest and write a thoughtful application, they are happy to accept that low overall yield, as long as they sometimes do get that student they want.

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They also consistently have a very high number of international students. About 25%, which helps to keep enrollment up and to pay the bills.

Friends of mine, who worked for Xerox back when they were headquartered there, loved Rochester. They said it was the best city they ever lived in for neighborhoods and family life. They also maintained a summer home in the Adirondacks with all of its great outdoor recreation opportunities which is not too far away.

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There is a lot to like about Rochester. I agree the location is a downside. Beyond that, for potential downsides, it’s rigorous with some harsh curves (or non-curves as it were)…hard to say though if there is grade deflation or just a lack of grade inflation. Like CWRU, the vibe is nerdy, so like at any school, visit if you can.

Lastly, regarding merit, Rochester is notable in that they seemingly often cut a student’s merit after the first year. And while many schools don’t guarantee the same level of merit for four years, Rochester in particular seems to decrease merit more so than other schools. Someone at CC experienced this, maybe @taverngirl? So, buyer beware there if one is counting on the same level of continued discount for years 2-4…certainly one should ask about that. I will say, in fairness, the numbers in the recent CDS don’t show there is an issue (on average) with the level of discount over 4 years, but if it does happen to a given student, well, the averages don’t matter.

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Yes, it’s important to read the fine print, ask question, and pay attention to the details.

I wonder if these were cases where students were required to maintain a minimum gpa to keep the merit?

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Not that I know of…just run of the mill discounting, which is generally more at risk than a specific scholarship and/or grid type of award.

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