Chance/Match me: Australian, 99.90GPA (4.0UW), 1540 SAT, psych/biochem

Chance Me / Match Me
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It’s interesting to me, given the political environment, that kids are still dying to come here.

No one can predict the job market when you graduate for Americans but it sure seems (on paper anyway) that non-Americans, especially non-white males, will not be welsome.

At least that’s how I see it.

Unfortunate…but it seems where we’re going.

And I’m not sure how strong our education will be - because a lot of important things will not be taught or at least independent thought in certain areas won’t be allowed.

Not sure I’d throw all my eggs in this basket…

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I think considering this person is a year 12 with stats that have probably been built over the past 3-4 years it’s hard to just let that all up due to the political climate.
given that it only dramatically changed this year as well, this issue probably wasn’t on op’s or plenty other international students’ minds when they initially decided to apply.

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@oj_panda7, to give you more context: there are nearly 3,000 4-year colleges in America. If you consider just the top 5%, that’s 150 colleges! So yes, we have a lot of excellent and well regarded colleges. However, as an international student who will likely go back home after graduation, you may also want to consider which of these schools are best known in your country (aside from the global brand names like Harvard and Princeton)

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I am a college professor here in the US and I can guarantee you have not heard of any of the 3 colleges I got my degrees at. Jobs here in the US for Americans are not based on the name of their college alone.

As others have said, the political climate here right now makes it impossible to guess what majors and jobs internationals will be “most welcomed at.”

The colleges on your list all have single digit acceptance rates for all applicants. You have to cross your fingers that the school “wants” an Australian that year basically and that you are better than the others from your country applying that year.

Perhaps look at schools with slightly higher acceptance rates. UCalifornia-Davis, U of Central Florida, U of Wisconsin-Madison, The Ohio State University, or Indiana U.

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UChicago is a finance target and loves their ED students, UVA has a business degree you apply to after your first year of university (and double majoring with a science is possible)

Remember to make sure need aware colleges are aware you don’t need financial aid by ticking the relevant box on the application.

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To be fair, besides medicine (a crapshoot at best as an international) OP’s intended fields are all highly network- and prestige- dependent. Stanford and UCSB may both have plenty of research opportunities, but the former makes breaking into VC drastically easier.

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True but all over the place really. Being a doctor, psych, biochem, or business and finance entrepreneur can take them different places. There’s quite a few colleges that oversee VC programs not on OPs list.

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My first reaction is that Melbourne is a great university. Having a safety that is this exceptional does indeed allow you to otherwise only apply to reaches. In fact, only applying to Melbourne and no where else would not be all that bad of an idea.

There is of course some challenge in interpreting your grades since most of us here on CC are from the USA, with a few of us being from other countries (there are a few Canadians for example on this web site), and a few of us having roots in two countries (the USA and Canada for me). However the large majority of us are not Australian. I wonder how your grades compare to others in your country. Generally, to have a good chance at the highest ranked universities in the US, you need to be relatively close to the #1 student in Australia who happens to apply this year, and there will be many years that any one top ranked university in the US accepts no students at all from Australia. I actually having studied at MIT (bachelor’s) and Stanford (master’s) and in five years never met any student from Australia (and this included attending international student events at both universities). I have since worked with a couple of excellent coworkers from Australia but both had attended university in Australia.

This makes good sense to me.

By the way, years ago I had a similar situation, in that my safety (McGill, in-province) was strong enough that otherwise I only applied to one reach school.

Are you sure that U.Penn is your #1 top choice? If so, then why is it your top choice? Would you clearly prefer it over Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford?

You do not need to apply ED anywhere. The top ranked universities in the US are looking for students who are a good fit for them. If you apply ED you are deciding which school is the best fit for you. If you do not apply ED anywhere then they each get to decide if you would be a good fit for them, and they get it right quite often.

If this means medical school, then do not expect to get accepted to medical school in the US. Medical school admissions in the US is exceptionally competitive for domestic students. The competition is intense. For international students it is way worse. The total number of international students accepted to medical school in the US is tiny (perhaps a few hundred each year).

I do not know what the situation is like for students who get their bachelor’s degree in the US and then want to get a medical degree in Australia. My best guess is that you would probably be better off getting your bachelor’s degree in Australia.

Getting a visa to work in the US after graduating from university in the US is tough. Usually you need an established company to sponsor you. Unfortunately having the intention to start a company might not give you the established company to sponsor you. On the other hand, as others have said, having a bachelor’s degree in psychology or biology from a university in the US is also not likely to motivate any company in the US to sponsor you – there are too many US citizens with a bachelor’s degree in these areas who are looking for jobs.

Also, immigration is a controversial political issue in the US right now. I do not know where this issue will be in four years. Some people would like legal immigration to be expanded and illegal immigration to be stopped, but that would involve rational thinking to enter US politics, and I would not count on this happening over the next four years, or ever.

With a US citizenship or permanent residence, UC Berkeley and UCLA are about as good as any universities in the US. Without the legal right to work in the US, no. It is not easy to get any job in the US.

In the unlikely event that you do get accepted to a highly ranked university in the US and choose to attend, then definitely attend the welcome reception for international students. You might be amazed who you will get to meet. I walked away from these welcome receptions twice with the thought “how did I get accepted here”, but also having met some people I otherwise would never have had the chance to meet.

You might want to consider getting a bachelor’s degree in Australia, but taking either a semester or a year abroad either in the US, or Canada, or the UK. You might want to take a close look at the exchange student program at the University of Melbourne.

This does relate to why I attended university in the US as an international student. One issue however is that immigration is becoming increasingly politicized and unpredictable.

One realistic option is to get a bachelor’s degree in Australia and then get a master’s degree or some other graduate degree in the US.

This really comes down to two issues. The visa or legal right to work in the US, and the state of the economy at the time that you graduate university. Both are very difficult to predict years in advance.

There are hundreds of universities in the US that are very good. One person I know very well got their bachelor’s degree at a school ranked in the 100-120 range, and then got two related master’s degrees at an Ivy League school. Another got their bachelor’s at a school ranked in the 100-130 range, and then got a doctorate (DVM) at a school ranked in the top 5 in North America. One daughter is currently getting a PhD at a highly ranked (top 30) school in a biomedical field, and the various students in her program come from a huge range of colleges and universities, some of which I have never heard of. Somewhere like Rutgers or U.Mass Amherst or one of the SUNY’s are all very good schools. I do not see why anyone from Australia would prefer any of these schools to U. Melbourne or to U. Sydney.

One problem. When applying for a student visa to study in the US, if you tell them that your intention is to stay in the US after graduation, that will be grounds to deny your student visa.

There might be three things that I would overall recommend for anyone applying to any top ranked universities in the US. One is to have exceptional grades. Another is to treat people well. This will help you get good letters of reference. In terms of ECs, I recommend that you do what is right for you, and do it very well. What is right for you, what is right for me, and what is right for some other student, may be almost entirely different things. You might also want to read the “applying sideways” blog on the MIT admissions web site. While MIT is not on your list, the same approach is a good one for other top universities, including any of the schools in the US that are on your list.

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So this might (or might not) be useful information–I have been studying the data available to me through the Common Data Set, and to me it looks like full pay Internationals are generally being admitted at roughly similar rates to domestic applicants at many need aware for International US colleges. However, at need blind for International US colleges, it appears to me the full pay International admit rate is usually much lower.

This implies to me your best bets as a full pay International are probably at need aware for Internationals US colleges, and in fact the less aid they have for Internationals at all, perhaps the better!

So currently on your list, Harvard and Princeton are need blind. You can still apply if you like, but I think those will be among your least likely options. For calibration purposes, to support being need blind, in their latest CDS reports they had International aid budgets of about $60M (Harvard) and $44M (Princeton–note it is a significally smaller undergrad program).

OK, then, say, Stanford is need aware, and in fact only had an International aid budget of about $20M. So maybe a little more likely, but on the other hand it is super popular with Internationals, so I don’t know.

OK, so you can keep doing this for the rest of your list, but I have some sample suggestions.

Washington University in St Louis (WashU) is an excellent university in general, particularly good for Psych and Biochem, and also they make it very easy to do multiple majors and minors. All that is promising, but the reason I am mentioning them is I happen to know they have a very low aid budget for Internationals–just around $2.3M, which is tiny compared to these others.

OK, so my guess is the full pay International acceptance rate is going to be much higher at WashU than it would be at Stanford, and even higher still than Harvard or Princeton.

Of course I don’t know if you would prefer it to your non-US options, but that is the sort of college I would have in mind as a better bet to get admitted to a really excellent US college in light of your stated interests.

As others were suggesting, many prominent public universities also have no, or very little, aid for Internationals. Of course the experience at many US publics is perhaps less different from the experience at large public universities in other countries.

But one you might consider is William & Mary, which is a very unusual public. It is extremely old (in fact second-oldest in the US after Harvard, and those are the names of the British monarchs who supported its founding as a colonial college), and it only affiliated with the state of Virginia much later in its history (circa 1906).

Today while public, in terms of size and character it more resembles a midsize private like the ones we are discussing. It would also be a very good academic choice given your interests. And it has no aid at all for Internationals.

So that would be another interesting option to consider, where I think you would get an excellent education, a very different experience, and might be pretty competitive for admissions as a full pay International.

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Many want less legal immigration as well, so there is a significant chance that immigration will become more difficult in the future.

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thats why my list is so high reach because theyre really the only ones that are well known and considered higher than the top local universities here.

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Only around 100 kids from victoria get a 99.90 or a 99.95, both are considered like super amazing and definitely at the very peak of all students so i wouldnt say my grades are an issue.

I really like penn, but you’re right it’s not my top choice obviously i would take HYPSM over it but the reason i want to apply ED there is because it would increase my chances of being admitted drastically, if i wait till regular or get deferred/rejected early (which is why im not applying early to HYPSM), theres probably a large chance that i could be rejected from everywhere and not get in. at that point i would definitely regret not applying ED to Penn. I was also considering ED Duke.

yes agreed that’s very much the reason why i dont have any “safety/match” schools on the list

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That’s generally a fallacy and definitely so at Penn. A lot of the ED round are hooked applicants (recruited athletes, legacy etc).

That said if you’re happy to apply elsewhere RD and finances aren’t an issue, you may as well do it for the chance that a very small chance becomes slightly bigger, understanding that if it is does you forfeit your chance at the others.

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I think the UK is a more plausible and less risky bet than HYPSM (and much cheaper for a full pay student), but not a viable route into medicine, either in the UK or US.

Having said that, most of my classmates at Oxbridge who came from Commonwealth countries 30-40 years ago (and then went home) have sent their kids to the US, because it has been perceived to have better long term prospects and higher wages if you get to stay. Whether that will still be true over the next few years remains to be seen, but even under the current administration it’s hard to be more pessimistic about the economic outlook for the US than the UK. Realistically the Australian economy might outperform either the US or the UK, so expecting to go home after your degree is not necessarily a bad thing.

I don’t think applying to lower ranked US schools makes much sense, given your opportunities (and lower costs) at home. You can always do a masters in the US or UK, or try for a Rhodes scholarship etc.

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I agree. I think there are only limited circumstances in which someone who gets admitted ED would not also get admitted RD, and those circumstances would not include an unhooked International applying to Penn.

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I can think of some schools where applying ED is definitely an advantage, but none of them are tipppy-tops and none on OP’s list (NYU, American, Tulane).

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Sydney Grammar? Don’t worry that all of your colleges are reach choices - you still have Australia to fall back on and you’ll definitely get into Sydney Uni or UNSW. Applying Early Admission will give you a better shot, so pick a college to apply EA that has good uplift. Most colleges are not needs blind for internationals, so if you can pay full freight, better. I would work on your essay topic; it has to stand out without being pretentious; keep it light; funny; engaging but punchy. I think you should add some more colleges to your list to raise your chances - it is a crapshoot. Duke, Rice, Chicago etc. Good luck.

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You could apply to UBC, UToronto, and McGill. With that ATAR you’re sure to get in and hear quickly. They’d provide a more close knit community than UMelbourne.

Wondering if Amherst College (open curriculum) could be of interest in terms of offering something really different from Melbourne and being consistently excellent.

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im from melbourne although i know the competition from sydney grammar and james ruse is so so fierce… duke is great i like duke

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i havent really looked into liberal arts colleges are they sort of like brown’s open curriculum? in what ways can they be seen as more advantageous than the better known colleges