Chance Me (a junior with some big dreams)

parentologist
Tue, 06 Apr 2021 21:58:33 +0000

Congratulations on having compiled such a great record. You’re in a good position. Of course, your Illinois flagship U as your safety.

You say your father’s heritage is European (by this, I’m assuming white) and that your mother was adopted in in Argentina. You actually can claim Hispanic, based upon your mother having been adopted in/from Argentina. The fact is that there are people whose grandparents fled from Europe to Latin America; they were there only briefly, but had a child/children while they were there, then immigrated to the US. The children of these people who were born in the few years that the European families spent in Latin America are checking the box for “Hispanic”. This would possibly give you a significantly higher chance at admission to an Ivy or Ivy-equivalent, and would make you eligible for scholarships reserved for those of Hispanic heritage. You may not be comfortable doing this, but it is permitted.

Private schools with high endowments may be generous with financial aid for a middle class family, although I doubt they’d offer enough to bring it down to your in-state cost for your flagship state U. The Ivies’ rule of thumb is tuition is 10% of family’s income for those families earning under 180K/yr - that may have been revised with inflation.

You might want to add Georgetown to your list, just because of your interests - being in DC might be a very good thing for you. If you’re looking for a merit scholarship, Tulane has been giving them to very strong students, plus they have some interesting highly selective special programs with an IR component.

It doesn’t matter how good you are - you’re very unlikely to get merit money from the UCs.

I think you might want to focus your search on schools which give merit money to top students. Many just below top schools do this. I know someone who got a half-tuition award for science at Tufts. I think this is where you need to focus your search.

Any chance of going farther with vocal performance with or without show choir in time to put it on applications in time for regular decision next year? Some Ivies are very proud of their performing groups, so if you were to make all-state or higher, especially nationals, this would give you an edge. Even so, the fact that your show choir did so well is not as minor as you think. All schools have music performance groups. There are never enough guys who can sing. It wouldn’t hurt to bring this out, if you could. Perhaps record a submission for a musical theater competition, and then use that as a music supplement for applications?