You need LORs from thisr who taught you in school.
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Dartmouth is relatively unusual in that it asks for a Peer Recommendation:
By far most colleges just want teacher recommendations, and at least many are open to optional additional recommendations from other adults (like a research supervisor, for example). But I have only seen peer or family recommendations from a few colleges.
One other example, though, is Rochester:
I am mentioning this because Rochester has an excellent Physics Department, and also is getting very aggressive about marketing to Internationals. In fact, it has one of the highest percentages of Internationals:
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/most-international
Just another to check out, and you can see a bit there about their own take on important values.
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But Rochester is up front they want high paying internationals. Fine school. OP can try but shouldn’t expect to be attending.
Teachers or professors who had you in class and/or worked with you = Letter of Rec but Dartmouth also wants a letter from a friend.
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Alright, I still know some good people that can write me rec letters, this shouldn’t be a problem.
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The rec letter thing sparked a debate over here. A friend of mine is helping a caltech professor write a paper, and he’s trusting on the rec letter that the proffesors going to write for him to get into an ivy leauge, basically treating as a “gold ticket”. is this the case? can one get rec letters from professors outside their country?
The professor can be an additional letter but it’s not a golden ticket. The 2 basic letters have to be by teachers who’ve had you in class and can give anecdotes as to how you react to a hard problem but also to criticism or setbacks, how you work in a group, how you behave with classmates or adults…
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I see. They’re basically for trying to know the student better then. Kinda.
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Yes, but it’s an additional optional rec for those universities that take extra recs
I got news for him; it’s not a golden ticket
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I was really glad to tell him that one. Obsessed with cs but he’s very out of touch with college admissions.
No social ECs, etc.
Sorry about that - but the BGZ spreadsheet is updated for the c/o 2025, so is likely to be at least mostly accurate for next year as well.
If I was in his shoes, I would definitely apply to Caltech.
As an opinion on schools that are need-blind for international applicants, this policy doesn’t seem to offer a distinct advantage over need-aware schools when considered statistically. Dartmouth, for example, accepted just 2.5% of recent international applicants (based on its current CDS, with some inference needed). A more important consideration would be whether or not a school meets the demonstrated financial need of the international applicants it does accept.
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We don’t necessarily have great statistics for this, but consider the following.
WashU, for example, claims its meets the need of all admitted students.
But per their 2023-24 CDS, WashU only had a budget of $1,917,548 for International aid, and only 30 of their 648 International students were receiving aid.
In the same CDS year, Dartmouth reported a budget of $34,016,015 for International aid, so over 17 times as much. 418 of their 603 Internationals were receiving aid.
OK, so WashU admitted about 5.9% of its International applicants, which is low to begin with. But what was its admissions rate for needy Internationals?
We don’t know, but I would bet that in order to keep to its budget for International aid, it had to be very, very low. Much lower than 5.9%, probably lower than 2.5%, possibly well under 1%.
Unless the word was out and needy Internationals were not even bothering to apply to WashU, but that would not mean it was easier to get a need aid package from WashU. Instead, it would be an illustration of why raw acceptance rates for broader pools don’t really tell you what you need to know for subpopulations.
I think the bottom line is if you want to estimate how hard it is to get a need aid package from a college as an International, you really have to look at their budget and try to figure out if they actually have many such offers available to begin with.
And as hard as it is to get one of those offers from Dartmouth, at least they have a decent number available. Whereas at WashU and other places with a really low International aid budget, it seems clearly they are mostly admitting just full pay Internationals, and it is likely far harder to get admitted as a needy International to WashU than even Dartmouth and the like.
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This originally was posted for another student interested in physics. Some of the suggestions may be relevant to you as well:
By my calculations, 418 represents 1.5% of the 28,230 total applicants who applied to Dartmouth last year.
OTOH, a SLAC like Wesleyan readily admits that the admission rate for internationals requiring aid is “extremely competitive”. Still, compared to what? Wesleyan’s overall admission rate will probably round out at ~16%. Half of that? A third? Even 10% of that admission rate for internationals who need financial assistance would be equal to or greater than Dartmouth’s..
Wouldn’t the need aware schools use their financial aid then in the same way other schools use merit aid? I.e. give it to those students they especially want, whichbusually means students with better academic stats then their usual applicant/admitted students pool.
So @merc81’s point still is a good one: internationals may have a better chance of admission with enough aid at need aware schools where rheir stats put them in the top 10%. Which is never going to be WashU. But might be, for example, Franklin & Marshall.
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I don’t think this jives with what I’ve observed (or what others have told me about their packages). The “need awares” are going to give just enough to get the kid according to their formula- which for internationals, is usually short of what they need. The internationals can’t plug the hole with federal loans, can’t work enough hours once they are in the US to make a serious dent in living expenses, etc. A kid who has to show “where’s the money” in order to get a student visa has already accumulated every single penny that he or she can- those merit offers are not always enough if there is a self-help component or if the family can’t possibly plug the hole.
Wesleyan shows an acceptance rate for international applicants of 6.4% on its CDS, which comports with the estimate above.
To extend the concept, the OP might consider a school such as Union College, for which the CDS shows an acceptance rate of 16.3% for international applicants.
At a certain point, even adjusted figures for international applicants at need-aware schools will suggest greater admission prospects than that of need-blind Dartmouth’s 2.5% acceptance rate.
Not incidentally, Union offers an amazing science facility, which should be appealing to an aspiring physicist.
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