Chance Daughter c/o 2023: STEM plus dance

Your daughter has the basic building blocks of getting admitted to a top college. Her GPA and scores are top notch. However the combination of STEM + ballet is quite unusual. What does she want to get out of college? Good STEM education? Or to become a professional ballerina? These are somewhat mutually exclusive of each other as I don’t see many colleges that do both of these well.

Columbia makes sense but realize that attending SEAS along with the Core will make things difficult – especially for something like ballet that requires a lot of practice. You also listed Harvard at the top of the list. Their engineering programs are somewhat new.

Since you are full pay, work with her to find a clear first choice – and apply EA/ED. Have a good plan in place for ED2, and then RD. Second thing I would recommend is to get a good college counselor and pay for advice on how to organize the EC list. Right now the ECs are all over the place and don’t convey a clear theme. Packaging expertise (esp on the Common App) will really help. Your daughters grades are excellent and are the star attraction. Keep in mind that the Adcom readers will spend less than 2 mins reading her application. So the less extraneous stuff, the greater they walk away with a clear picture of your daughter and how she fits into the future class.

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