Chance an interdisciplinary (writing + physics) kid [4.0 GPA, 36 ACT, 1590 SAT]

Chance Me / Match Me
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Demographics: Competitive public school. Finances are not an issue. No hooks

Intended Majors: Creative writing and applied math/physics/astrophysics… (Also seeking advice on schools that would support both of these interests or particular dual degree(?) programs I should be looking into)

GPA, Rank, and Test Scores: Unweighted HS GPA: 4.0/4.0, Weighted HS GPA: 4.7/5.0

ACT/SAT Scores: 36 ACT/1590 SAT

APs (until senior year): Bio (5), Calc BC (5), 4 on CSA, soon to take AP Physics C E&M, Physics C Mechanics, Lang, APUSH, and Spanish 5 (and retake CSA). Next semester taking Gov, Micro, Chem, Lit, Spanish 6, Stats. Self-studied freshman year: Physics 1 (4) - likely won’t submit, Music Theory (5 with 4 subscore) - likely won’t submit, Precalc (5)

Other courses: Calc 3, Linear Algebra, essentially maximum rigor except for band

Awards (unfortunately extremely doxxable esp if you’re from my state, so please don’t investigate):

  1. One of the most prestigious national writing competitions
  2. Numerous Scholastic medals and gold keys (and other regional/national writing awards in additional info)
  3. Awards at state science fair all years (top project/best in category)
  4. All-region (first chair)/all-state honors band
  5. AIME with distinction (this probably doesn’t mean much with the prolific cheating nowadays), other math statewide and regional awards, some mid (top 40 scorers, top 10%, etc) physics contests awards (not USAPHO). Also may squeeze some of these together or in additional info)

Extracurriculars (also easily doxxable, apologies for vague wording):

  1. Independent science fair research (three yrs), invited to and presented at conference
  2. Unpaid in-person physics summer research internship, week-long free physics STEM summer camp, summer-long online computing workshop
  3. Astrobiology research (two summers), presented at conference
  4. Four online writing studios/workshops (most notably Adroit) + in-person writing camp (mildly selective but not one of the big names)
  5. Created/led class for nonprofit teaching middle schoolers, other volunteer work for science fair and olympiads
  6. Founded a science magazine and a literary magazine, edit school litmag + two other online litmags, audition-selected member of spoken word team
  7. Freelance writing - Published in journals, wrote two chapbooks (w/ minor recognitions in contests), currently trying to publish but no guarantee by app deadlines
  8. Band (marching captain, school section leader, community band member, subbed for professional band once lol)
  9. Physics Club Board (+ publish instructional physics videos personally, not sure if I’ll mention this because it’s low-impact), space law mentee
  10. Math modeling/volunteer math tutoring… scraping the bottom of the barrel here, might split some of the earlier writing activities and combine some of the STEM ones

Cost Constraints / Budget

Parents are willing to pay for a “good” (top ten lmao) school; otherwise they’ll pay for my state school.

Schools

Still definitely working on this list and would like feedback on where else (or where not to!) apply… I’m hoping to attend a college with interdisciplinary opportunities and a strong liberal arts presence (note the clear shift away from STEM and toward creative writing in my junior year haha), which is why I’m shooting to go somewhere other than UIUC though my school is a feeder. Professionally, I’m almost certain I’ll pursue something in STEM for stability reasons (possibly engineering; even though I haven’t yet taken formal engineering courses, it’s something I’d like to explore). I value the ability to switch majors and explore a variety of interests. I would also strongly prefer attending a school away from the south as well as a school that isn’t too large.

Stanford REA - my “dream” school if such a thing can be said
UIUC EA
UMich EA
UNC EA
UVA EA
UT Austin EA
Iowa

I’m fairly confident I’ll get into UIUC as it can be considered a safety for my school. For RD, I’ll shotgun all of the standard ones… Considering Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Brown, Columbia, Vanderbilt, UPenn, Berkeley, and Northwestern.

Looking for a “chance me” and general feedback on my list:

  1. Given these interdisciplinary interests, are there any specific programs/universities that would facilitate both creative writing and physics (e.g. strong liberal arts influence but also engineering opportunities)?
  2. Are there any other schools I should consider applying to, and are there any schools I should take off the list?

Many thanks for the infinite wisdom of all those on College Confidential

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Closing temporarily while awaiting info from OP

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If you parents will only pay for “top ten” schools or your in-state public schools, then all of the above except Stanford and whichever public school is in-state for you are likely to be unaffordable.

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I got my master’s degree at Stanford and loved it, so I am sympathetic. Of course a one year master’s (which Stanford offers several of) is quite a bit less expensive compared to a four year bachelor’s degree, just because the duration is so much shorter.

I think that you are competitive for any university in the USA. I think that Stanford is well worth sending in an application.

In an article many years ago in the alumni magazine Stanford admissions said that about 80% of applicants are academically fully qualified to attend. You are clearly in that 80%. The problem is that the acceptance rate is just under 4%. Thus it is very hard to predict results there, other than to say that you are competitive. Of course if you do not get into Stanford for undergrad, it seems entirely possible that you might some day be a competitive applicant for a graduate program also, assuming that you do very well in whatever university you attend and get very good related experience. In my experience and the experience of people I know the various graduate students at Stanford and in other highly ranked graduate programs come from a huge range of undergraduate schools.

I doubt that you need any specific program. Wherever you end up, for example you might just major in physics and take whatever other courses in other areas you want to take. Whatever you can do with a dual major in physics (or math) and English, you could also do with a degree in physics (or math) having just taken the English courses and done well in them. This is by the way pretty much a summary of what a professor told me years ago when I asked a similar question. He turned out to be correct.

However, the ability to write well can be a significant asset in a rather wide range of careers and for students with a rather wide range of majors. As one example someone has to write the various papers that show up in scholarly physics journals (or biomedical journals, or …). I majored in math, and discovered sometime in the middle of my career that I can also write, and have found lots of of ways to use this talent (writing about something technical). Someone I know is discovering the same thing with a biomedical research focus, but again with papers to be written. It is not unheard of for there to be multiple collaborators on any particular scientific project, and the one who can actually write gets to write the paper (with the others double checking for nits – if you stare at anything long enough it eventually becomes hard to see the errors that you wrote into the paper two or three iterations ago).

I think that you are likely to do well wherever you end up.

If you do end up at Stanford or MIT or a similar school do not be surprised if you discover that there is a rather shocking number of other students who are just as academically strong as you are, with a rather wide range of backgrounds. There are likely to be quite a few very strong students at your in-state public school also. Wherever you end up make a strong effort to stay ahead starting from day 1, and take advantage of whichever opportunities show up. There will be a lot of opportunities at any of a very wide range of universities.

Best wishes.

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Would your parents pay in full for Vanderbilt, Brown, and Northwestern?

Vanderbilt, Duke, Rice, and CWRU all give merit aid. That might be better the full pay at an Ivy, although it would be a long shot.

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I should clarify: parents are willing and able to pay the cost of college and would pay the full tuition for schools like Northwestern. I’ve expressed my desire to go out of state, and to this they’ve said that this can’t be a deciding factor and they’re opposed to paying significantly more for a school with similar “ROI” as UIUC (which is reasonable)

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Few of your potential choices appear to be especially oriented toward your intended academic paths. You seem to have composed an arbitrary list of schools for the most part.

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Would they pay for Michigan, UVA or UNC? While those schools are somewhat more highly ranked (overall, not for engineering) than UIUC, they are not T10 and they will be a lot more expensive OOS than UIUC. Also, UNC does not offer traditional Engineering as a major. I wouldn’t spend time and money applying to schools that your parents won’t pay for.

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What is their definition of “ROI”?

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I would think if you want to really double major in very diverse topics, or make a combined degree or something you want to think about smaller more liberal artsy- private universities with open curriculum or known for allowing combined majors or easy double-majoring (off top of my head) - Brown, Northwestern (pretty easy to double major), Dartmouth (you can mash up majors or readily double major), I am sure there are plenty of others.

Big state schools seem like they would be hard to combine majors or seriously dive into both tracks readily, though I could be wrong. They generally are very divided programs and are less flexible… Many schools’ double majoring is quite rare…

You should see how technically feasible this will be to do at your state school… you maybe can minor in one, and major in another, but availability of classes and such can be a challenge outside of one’s home school (depending on state, etc. etc.). Just being pragmatic.

I am not sure why the OOS state schools make a ton of sense..do you think you will get tons of merit? I would be looking at a step down private schools w/ merit and flexibility.

I was in a small session with an AO from a very highly selective school recently (not Stanford) and they said roughly 70-75% were academically admissible year to year…I would imagine the range is probably probably like 60-80% depending exactly how “holistic” the school is…
your point is well taken - this candidate is obviously in that category, as are many.

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My two cents is at the undergrad level, you might want to be more picky about creative writing programs than Physics. Physics, particularly at the undergrad level, is more standardized. At the PhD level you probably want to be more picky about being the right sort of Physics department, but in my view that is less important within a wide range of generally good undergrad Physics departments. For the most part, I would say the same about Engineering–a good undergrad engineering program is going to mostly be more standardized (in fact, arguably too many engineering kids these days are looking to specialize too quickly at the undergrad level).

And then you likely are quite right to also want to be very careful about the curriculum structure really working for exploring such interests.

I’m therefore going to kinda ignore that thing about your parents only being willing to pay for “top ten” (whatever that means to them) schools for now. A generic “top ten” list isn’t useful in circumstances like yours, and hopefully your parents can be brought around on that issue.

By way of example, Brown would potentially be a good choice for a Reach for you. The Literary Arts program at Brown is great, and their open curriculum approach is very good for exploratory kids:

Columbia, in contrast, is not necessarily a college I would recommend for you, largely because of the Core Curriculum approach. To be fair, the right sort of kid can get a great broad education that way, but I think it would be less flexible for your specific sort of case. In terms of other Ivies, Yale and Princeton would also potentially be good choices, maybe Penn.

OK, then a couple more still Reachy but not quite as Reachy options you could consider would be Emory and WashU. Emory again has an extremely well-regarded undergrad creative writing program. My one major concern is they don’t have a dedicated Creative Writing minor (I thought they did at one point, but apparently no longer):

WashU is really a specialist in combining diverse interests, and again has a very well-regarded Creative Writing program. They also have a special scholars program for Creative Writers that might be of interest:

That does require a commitment to doing a minor in Writing, but again WashU makes it VERY easy to combine diverse majors and minors.

NYU would then be another to strongly consider. Again strong program in general, and then they have a popular minor as well:

You might want to consider some Liberal Arts and Sciences colleges as well. A couple that stand out in terms of being strong both for Creative Writing and sciences (although not specifically engineering, although you can do that afterwards for grad school) are Kenyon and Oberlin:

Some parents are not very familiar with LACs and their appeal, but if it helps, you can do things like look up College Transitions’ PhD Feeders study, medical school placement study, law school placement study, and so on, and see how LACs can be great choices for paths that require further education anyway.

Just by way of example, Kenyon was the #18 per capita PhD feeder in Physics, right after Cornell and just ahead of Columbia. Oberlin was #30, still ahead of Carnegie Mellon, Cal-Berkeley, Stanford, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins . . . . Of course in some sense these PhD numbers are inflated a bit by self-selection, as in savvy students/families interested in PhD programs and such disproportionately choose LACs. But they do that because it works, which is something to keep in mind. And if you also love the Creative Writing program, well, that could make such an LAC a great choice.

OK, this is really just a start, but hopefully you get the idea. If you ended up going to Illinois, that’s fine too, but these would all be opportunities for a different sort of overall college experience, and potentially one more suitable for your specific interests and exploratory mindset.

And again, hopefully your parents can be brought around on what sorts of colleges are “worth” paying for in your particular circumstances.

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Yes, although very small physics departments may not be able to offer all of the usual upper level physics courses at reasonable frequency.

Larger physics departments may also offer additional upper level physics or astronomy electives beyond the standard undergraduate physics courses.

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Yes. I think this is mostly a non-issue among R1 sort of doctoral research universities, and I tend to put less weight on really specialized electives because I think often what a kid is even interested in doing is likely to change. But if they are undergrad-only programs, I think you should investigate details.

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I would add that one of the top creative writing programs in the country is right there with the safeties. U Iowa is acknowledged as a having a top tier creative writing program.

Otherwise, I think that, among the reaches, Princeton would be a my recommendation over Brown.

I do agree that Oberlin and Kenyon are great choices, and I think that, if @orionk0 likes the idea of a LAC, Kenyon should be at the top of the list, considering that it’s not only #18 in being a feeder for physics, but also one of the very top colleges for creative writing.

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Just a note that it’s not possible to double major at Princeton, so the student could minor in creative writing there versus potentially double-majoring at other schools. Also, Princeton only offers creative writing as a minor.

Practically, this may not be important, but just noting that the senior research thesis at Princeton basically precludes double majoring at all.

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Since others have mentioned Brown for its flexibility with regards to double majoring and the Open Curriuclum, I just want to add that it has a very well-regarded applied math program, which you said was one of your interests.

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Absolutely!

That’s one of the very few publics I could see being worth considering OOS over Illinois, for that very reason.

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That’s funny–I knew it had a minor, and a generally well-regarded Creative Writing program, so I thought to include it as an alternative Ivy/”T10” suggestion. But I actually didn’t know there was no major!

For the OP, if Princeton remains of interest, you might want to check out if people who do that minor sometimes go on to competitive MFA programs. My (strong) guess is yes, but it might be good to know.

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