Chance me for Harvard REA [4.0 UW, 1580 SAT, Math major, needs aid]. Should I apply early elsewhere?

Chance Me / Match Me
1

Demographics: Junior, White Male, CT, 150k/year (will need aid), feeder prep school
Intended Major(s): Mathematics

SAT: 1580 (800M, 780R)
UW/W GPA and Rank: School doesn’t rank, 4.0/4.0 UW

Coursework:

  • APs:
  • AP Calc BC (5, AB Subscore: 5)
  • AP Physics 1 (5),
  • AP CS A (5)
  • AP Macro (?, self-study)
  • AP Micro (?, self-study)
  • AP Physics C (?, both)
  • AP Stats (?, senior year)
  • AP English Lit (?, self-study)
  • AP Spanish Lit (?, senior year)
  • took multivariable calc, linear algebra, and diffeqs. Took most rigorous courses wherever I could.

Awards:

  • National Spanish Exam (Level 2) Gold (+ 99th %ile)
  • National Spanish Exam (Level 3) Perfect Score Award
  • USACO Silver
  • USAPhO Qualifier
  • FTC Robotics: States top 8 & New Englands 10 top (not saying specific place for privacy)
  • Top 3 finishes in multiple laser and 420 sailing regattas + high finishes in others
  • Won school’s math award
  • Won “MVP” in my sailing race team and “junior instructor of the year”

Extracurriculars:

  • Competitive Swimming (since 2nd grade, not amazing at it but not bad either, 15 hrs/week)
  • Student Body President
  • Competitive Sailing (only in summers, I am decent)
  • coding (for fun, I have a github account with a project that has 150-ish stars)
  • music production (I have perfect pitch so I enjoy making song arrangements and acapella arrangements)
  • Founder of School AI Club - educates people on LLMs, AGI, prompt engineering, and career prospects in AI
  • Volunteered as sailing instructor at local club
  • Volunteered as an SAT, math, and CS tutor at schoolhouse.world (haven’t calculated the # of hours yet, but probably in the low to mid 100s)
  • Social media manager at schoolhouse.world
  • Head of Hedge Fund Club

Reaches: Harvard (REA), MIT, Yale, Princeton, CMU, Dartmouth, UPenn
Targets: UVA, Georgetown (building this part of my list more later)
Safeties: UCONN, RPI

2

Adding the OP’s last chance me thread

One of the advantages of your feeder prep school is they have college counselors to help you curate an appropriate list, as well as advise which school will be best for an early application. They will also know who else is applying REA to Harvard and whether those applicants stand a better or worse chance compared to you.

Personally, I’m hesitant to suggest a better early option given your responses in your earlier thread to users’ suggestions:

14 Likes
3

yeah I was a bit edgy. I apologize for my past actions and have learned from them and moved on.

1 Like
4

Harvard, MIT, and Princeton are all of course excellent for mathematics. Stanford is also (but is a lot further away with your coming from Connecticut). You are competitive for all of these schools. However, they are reaches. Fortunately they are also need blind for admissions and have relatively decent need based financial aid should you get accepted. I doubt that your chances at any of them are much different from the overall acceptance rate.

In the unlikely event that you get accepted to MIT and decide to go there then you might want to ask me privately about their sailing pavilion. I was pleasantly surprised last spring to discover that the sailing card that I filled out more than 50 years ago is still valid and I could have gone sailing there any time in the last 50+ years (I did go sailing twice with a daughter this past summer).

There are a lot of universities that are very good for mathematics. UVA is one of them. You might also want to consider U.Mass Amherst and the University of Wisconsin. Some of the smaller schools are also good. You might want to for example consider Williams College. You might want to run the NPCs for these schools to get an estimate regarding whether they will be affordable.

And you do need to make sure that you are applying to solid and affordable safeties. The reaches are sometimes easy to pick out for a very strong student since reaches are famous schools, but the safeties need to be solid because you might end up there.

1 Like
5

Thanks! UVA and Williams are on my list. I am hesitant to apply to Umass because there is very little out of state financial aid.

I’m not sure if I want to try to get recruited for sailing, but if I do become lucky enough to go to MIT, I’ll be sure to check the pavilion out!

2 Likes
6

I do not think that they recruit anyone for sailing. It is a fun thing to do however and they do have some facilities.

1 Like
7

Chance you for Harvard - your title. It’s a reach.

Should you apply early elsewhere - Yes where allowed.

But let me add if your goal is Harvard, should you apply ED elsewhere? No. Why? If you get in, you are bound.

Not sure I’d call UVA and Gtown targets although they are very possible.

UConn is a safety as is RPI - so your list is great.

Have you run the NPC for all your reaches and what you have listed as matches- as there’s no merit. At $150K, at some, you’ll get more than others but don’t forget they look at assets too, not just income. So you might see their NPC result and realize, I can’t afford this and take them off.

You might add (I hate to add other top levels) a Vandy and WUSTL because they have both half and full scholarships. Not sure if Rice does - but it may be another. If you have slots left, they might prove financially beneficial to you. SMU would be another with its Presidential Full Ride. It’s strong in math.

Not sure your overall budget and obviously UCONN in state will be cheaper but UMD and Wisconsin are both known for math (but in the $60K range) - and to give yourself a safety substitute for UCONN that will come with merit - both UMN and Ohio State are leaders in math which will come in under UMD and Wisconsin. Purdue, at $40K all in, would be another good one to look at if that makes budget. I just saw from your other thread you need $30K so these schools won’t work - but a school like Alabama (100%) - or Florida State (if you qualify for the OOS waiver - which you should) will work. When you have budget concerns, you need to make tradeoffs. Maybe Uconn works - it shows $35K b4 merit - but you need to ensure you have at least one I can afford it (and I love it) school on your list - if that is UCONN (assuming they give merit), you’re likely ok. But if not you have to look further. If you make $150K, UVA likely is not that school - but again, run the net price calculator as they do meet need (UNC is the other).

But yeah, you need an RPI (may not be affordable but then two more that 100% will be… You should see if you can get the RPI Medal. You might let your school counselor know if your interest but $30K may still be out of reach.

A safety for you…as would be UCONN. If you didn’t want UCONN, you could be $20K at Alabama and $25K ish at FSU if FSU gives you the waiver. It’s why these schools draw from all over - including thousands from the Northeast - and both have Honors and other enrichment programs. For the most part and for a math major, yes there are rankings - but a flagship is a flagship and it will get you to the same place. And you need to have your budget met.

Strong profile and you might not need a safety but - one never knows when you put up a list like you have.

Best of luck.

The Rensselaer Medal | Admissions (rpi.edu)

1 Like
8

Harvard recruits for sailing, as do other ivies. It’s something I’m considering but I’m not sure if I’m good enough.

1 Like
9

There’s that and you have to look at the NPCs. You have to ensure you can go there for $30K at Harvard or the others? You are more than $150K income. Your family likely has assets and all this needs to be fed into the NPC.

For your UCONN, here’s another that gives great merit - and maybe you can get to $30K.

I’m just talking about the “safety” school which you need. Preferably two of.

Schedule | URI Sailing (rhodysailing.org)

1 Like
10

Apply as a recruited sailor for harvard. That is essentially ea, if coach wants you. You wont know if you dont try. Meanwgile uconn will give u honors and 5k. Rpi qull match it if you ask.

1 Like
11

You say that like there’s a check box for recruited sailor on the Common App. It’s more complicated than that.

The OP can reach out to the coaches via the recruiting form to gauge any interest. If there is, the coach will guide through the process.

While Harvard does recruit for sailing, they’re limited to about 3 slots annually, including both men and women. Mist +and likely all) recruits have completed nationally and/or internationally. But again, the OP can ask

2 Likes
12

how do you know this for a fact?

13

It’s getting late in the game for recruiting for sailing. Many juniors - with top national and/or international results - would already have been in discussions with varsity programs. Only coaches at varsity - not club - programs can help with admissions (you need a “slot”, not “soft support” for that to be meaningful). Also, many of the top sailing teams need more women than men. In Fall and Spring, there is a coed/open regatta schedule and a women’s regatta schedule. Women who can skipper are esp. needed and can sail at both, and women - given size - are more often needed as crew at both. Not saying it’s not possible - just very difficult - for you to get recruited. Summer sailing or low-level recreational sailing is very unlikely to help you with the top varsity programs (many of which are at top academic schools). At best, it’s an extracurricular.

6 Likes
14

OP- have you actually run the NPC’s on the schools you are interested in to see if their price matches what your family can afford? The easy part is “needs aid”. The harder part is when your income, assets, etc. mean that the packages which are coming out of the college’s calculators are well above what your family can contribute. If that’s the case, you need to be looking at merit aid colleges which will be a completely different list of schools.

Sorry if I missed that part. But if you could give us a list of “these colleges appear to be affordable for us” we can help you figure out the other stuff. Except for getting recruited- your coach is a more accurate resource for that.

3 Likes
15

Your family needs to run the Net Price Calculators at schools that do not provide merit aid (Harvard, Yale, etc) to see which ones are affordable, if any. (Actually, it would be great if you could provide a list of those that are affordable and then not affordable, so we have a sense of how generous of a need-based aid school is needed.)

If no schools that don’t offer merit meet the budget via NPC, then please provide us with the annual college budget, without any loans. This will let us know how much merit aid we need to find at a school to see whether it would fall within budget. Some schools offer merit aid but they max out at a certain amount, and if that amount isn’t enough to reach budget, it’s pointless to suggest the school.

By the way, my understanding is that most colleges don’t look favorably on self-studying for APs. If you’re at a feeder prep school, it is definitely not necessary to be doing those.

5 Likes
16

I’ve been thinking about your situation and have come up with a list of schools that are strong in math (offering through a doctorate in the field). They also have gone on to produce a number of alumni who went on for a PhD in the field. For the most part, I kept to the general geographic parameters of your original list (Mid-Atlantic and New England) though I did throw in a few outliers. All of the schools on this list offer merit aid, and for some I included the source for merit info.

Johns Hopkins, for instance, offers scholarships up to 2/3 the cost of tuition. That still leaves nearly $21k to pay for tuition plus an additional $20k for room & board, totallling about $41k. So, that’s a lot better than paying more than $83k/year, but if $41k/year isn’t within the budget, then it should be eliminated. Same thing for Brandeis (max of $24k) or Northeastern (max of $28k).

Additionally, it can be very challenging to get a maximum merit award. Your chances are probably likeliest at schools that are not the most competitive.

When chancing students, I usually use categories like this

Extremely Likely (80-99+%)

Likely (60-79%)

Toss-Up (40-59%)

Lower Probability (20-39%)

Low Probability (less than 20%)

In terms of finding big merit aid awards, I’ve now started another classification system. A system like this might help your family to gauge how it wants to craft the college application list in terms of trying to suss out the likelihood of a school coming back with a favorable financial result.

Extremely Likely (80-99+%) Schools that list big award packages or NPC results for a student with the appropriate stats

  • U. of Arizona: About 39k undergrads and a very well-reputed honors college; 65 doctorates. With your current stats, you’d get $32k/year, leaving about $24k/year in costs (source).
  • U. of Nebraska: About 19k undergrads; 63 doctorates. The NPC indicated that you’d be likely to get at least $20k/year here (which would bring costs to about $21k/year) and that you’d be competitive for the full ride scholarship. (I suspect that because they’re likely to give you the OOS waiver that you’d then be eligible for the President’s Scholarship, as I indicated Connecticut as your home state).
    image
    image1104×551 25 KB

Low Probability (likely or extremely likely admit that has a selective number of big merit scholarships)

  • Clarkson (NY): About 2700 undergrads; 18 doctorates. Up to full tuition scholarships are available (source).
  • George Washington (D.C.): About 11k undergrads; 19 doctorates. Up to full tuition scholarships are available (source).
  • RPI (NY): About 5900 undergrads; 69 doctorates. Offers up to at least $40k/year (Medal, but awards do not stack…source).
  • Syracuse (NY): About 15k undergrads; 12 doctorates. Offers up to full tuition, stacked (source).
  • U. of Maryland – College Park: About 30k undergrads; 84 doctorates

Very Low Probability (toss-up or lower probability school with very few big merit awards, or a more selective school with a higher percentage of students getting a big merit award)

  • Brandeis (MA): About 3700 undergrads; 29 doctorates. Offers up to $24k/year in merit aid (source).
  • Lehigh (PA ): About 5600 undergrads; 13 doctorates. Offers up to full tuition scholarships (source).
  • U. of Rochester (NY): About 6800 undergrads; 51 doctorates. Scholarships of up to full tuition available (source).

Really Very Low Probability (lower probability of admission and then extremely competitive to get a big merit award)

  • Case Western (OH): About 6k undergrads; 33 doctorates. Up to full tuition scholarships are available (source).

Extremely Low Probability (low probability to get into the school, and then extremely competitive to get a big merit award)

  • Boston College (MA): About 10k undergrads; 25 doctorates. Up to full tuition scholarships are available (source).
  • Boston U. (MA): About 18k undergrads; 52 doctorates Up to full tuition scholarships are available (source).
  • Johns Hopkins: About 6k undergrads; 28 doctorates. Merit scholarships up to 2/3 of tuition are available (source).
  • Northeastern (MA): About 16k undergrads; 14 doctorates. Offers merit scholarships of up to $28k/year (source).
  • U. of Chicago (IL): About 7600 undergrads; 210 doctorates

Then there are these schools that I’m not going to categorize, except that I think they’re all likely or extremely likely admits for you. Not knowing much about your budget, these schools may have the potential to meet that threshold. If you only need a partial scholarship rather than the biggest scholarship, then the odds for getting the right combination improve. Additionally, Stony Brook and U. at Buffalo would cost no more in tuition than it would cost to attend UConn, as there is a flagship match at those schools. Though Binghamton is not included in the flagship match, for you, I suspect they would make themselves competitive. But there are schools below that offer full tuition or full ride scholarships, and I think you could be competitive for them.

  • Binghamton (NY): About 14k undergrads; 34 doctorates

  • Ohio State: About 46k undergrads; 73 doctorates

  • Penn State: About 42k undergrads; 71 doctorates

  • Rutgers – New Brunswick (NJ): About 36k undergrads; 76 doctorates

  • Stony Brook (NY): About 18k undergrads; 64 doctorates

  • U. at Buffalo (NY): About 21k undergrads; 30 doctorates

  • U. of Connecticut: About 19k undergrads; 27 doctorates

  • U. of Delaware: About 19k undergrads; 25 doctorates

  • U. of Massachusetts: About 24k undergrads; 35 doctorates

  • U. of Minnesota – Twin Cities: About 39k undergrads; 51 doctorates

  • U. of Pittsburgh (PA ): About 24k undergrads; 47 doctorates

  • U. of Rhode Island: About 15k undergrads; 22 doctorates

1 Like
17

Okay, last post for awhile. :slight_smile:

Below is a chart that shows the schools I listed above with the number of doctorates earned in the math/statistics fields between 2000-2018 as well as the number of students who received a Bachelor’s in those fields in 2022. I then created a ratio based off of those numbers.

First of all, the ratios at all of these schools are very good, though some obviously have ratios of students going on for doctorates than others.

Secondly, you might not care much about the ratio but prefer to have a certain size cohort in the area (whether small, medium, or large). Thus, I’ve shared the list a second time, sorting by cohort size.

Sorted by ratio, highest to lowest:

School # of Math & Statistics Doctorates alums earned between 2000-2018 # of Math & Statistics Bachelors awarded in 2022 Ratio of doctorates to 2022 bachelor’s earned
Clarkson 18 11 1.6364
U. of Chicago 210 244 0.8607
U. of Rhode Island 22 26 0.8462
RPI 69 83 0.8313
U. of Nebraska 63 81 0.7778
Case Western 33 45 0.7333
U. of Arizona 65 102 0.6373
George Washington 19 33 0.5758
Lehigh 13 23 0.5652
Rutgers 76 163 0.4663
U. of Delaware 25 56 0.4464
Brandeis 29 68 0.4265
U. of Pittsburgh 47 117 0.4017
U. of Rochester 51 129 0.3953
Boston U. 52 148 0.3514
U. of Maryland 84 260 0.3231
Boston College 25 81 0.3086
Penn State 71 249 0.2851
Syracuse 12 48 0.2500
Ohio State 73 355 0.2056
U. at Buffalo 30 147 0.2041
U. of Minnesota 51 254 0.2008
Binghamton 34 175 0.1943
Johns Hopkins 28 156 0.1795
Northeastern 14 88 0.1591
U. of Massachusetts 35 256 0.1367
U. of Connecticut 27 208 0.1298
Stony Brook 64 519 0.1233

Sorted by # of Bachelors earned in 2022, from highest to lowest:

School # of Math & Statistics Doctorates alums earned between 2000-2018 # of Math & Statistics Bachelors awarded in 2022 Ratio of doctorates to 2022 bachelor’s earned
Stony Brook 64 519 0.1233
Ohio State 73 355 0.2056
U. of Maryland 84 260 0.3231
U. of Massachusetts 35 256 0.1367
U. of Minnesota 51 254 0.2008
Penn State 71 249 0.2851
U. of Chicago 210 244 0.8607
U. of Connecticut 27 208 0.1298
Binghamton 34 175 0.1943
Rutgers 76 163 0.4663
Johns Hopkins 28 156 0.1795
Boston U. 52 148 0.3514
U. at Buffalo 30 147 0.2041
U. of Rochester 51 129 0.3953
U. of Pittsburgh 47 117 0.4017
U. of Arizona 65 102 0.6373
Northeastern 14 88 0.1591
RPI 69 83 0.8313
U. of Nebraska 63 81 0.7778
Boston College 25 81 0.3086
Brandeis 29 68 0.4265
U. of Delaware 25 56 0.4464
Syracuse 12 48 0.2500
Case Western 33 45 0.7333
George Washington 19 33 0.5758
U. of Rhode Island 22 26 0.8462
Lehigh 13 23 0.5652
Clarkson 18 11 1.6364
2 Likes
18

Since your discussions here last November/December, have you:

(a) Run the NPCs for these colleges? and

(b) Visited anywhere?

I think the first thing remains essential for your case, and the second could be very helpful to figuring out where, if anywhere, you should apply ED or REA/SCEA.

1 Like
19

You have a strong profile.

Consider adding: U Chicago, Brown, & Northwestern to your list of schools.

You qualify for every school with which I am familiar, therefore, a primary concern might be to identify any particular program or course of study at each school which excites you.

Your background reveals strong leadership skills & initiative/organizational ability.

Each time I research a specific university, I am amazed at the niche offerings and opportunities open to those with particular talents and a strong work ethic.

Given your background at an elite New England prep school, it will be difficult to look beyond Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn-Wharton, MIT, & Stanford, but don’t overlook U Chicago and any other elite private school which offers a program that is of interest to you.

1 Like
20

What about Williams ED? If I’m being honest, I like williams more than even harvard due to some unique opportunities, the rural location, and abundance of research for undergrads, but I am worried that I would be losing some “prestige” even though it’s the #1 LAC. Thoughts? Do I have a chance there?

1 Like