Recruitable athlete for D3 schools (tennis) and Ivy Legacy
High Income
Intended Major(s)
Bio/Chem
GPA, Rank, and Test Scores
GPA: 3.9
SAT Score: 1570
Coursework (School doesn’t offer APs)
Math: Calc 2 and Linear Algebra
Science: AP Chem equivalent, AP Physics Equivalent, Genetics, Organic Chem, Biochem, 2nd Year College Bio Equivalent
History and social studies: APUSH Equivalent
Language other than English: 6th Year Chinese
Visual or performing arts: Orchestra (Double Bass)
Awards
USNCO Qualifier
School Chinese Awards
School Science Award
Research Awards
All-League Tennis
Extracurriculars
Chem Club Leader (2 Years)
Diversity Club Leader (2 Years)
Biology Club Leader (1 Year)
Diversify Our Narrative Leader (1 Year)
Chem and Bio Tutor (3 Years)
Student Leader Position (2 Years)
Varsity Tennis (6 Years) and Tennis Tournaments
Ranked Top 5 in state for Tennis
Volunteer teaching kids tennis
Published Genetics Research
RSI
Internship at BioTech Company
Chemistry Research Internship at local university
China Study Abroad
Essays/LORs/Other
I think that my essay and LORs are strong
Schools
I’m not really sure at the moment! If I train hard I could possibly play NCAA tennis at a small school, but I also wanna find the right fit for me! Any suggestions help!
Arguably, your school has the best college counseling office in the nation, with all sorts of data on past applicants. They are well-versed on guiding students to build an appropriate college list. Your tennis coach will have guidance on appropriate schools for recruiting. These resources can answer your questions better than anonymous people on the Internet, even if any of these people has experience with your school.
I agree your high school might be the best place to start.
But if you are looking for some ideas, here are some basic questions:
What class year are you? This will determine what you should be doing if you are interested in being recruited for a D3 tennis team. If you decide not to go that route, you could also consider club tennis. They can be quite competitive.
Do you have a budget? Are you interested in merit aid? [Edit: looks like you are fine with full pay]
Any idea what sort of college you would like? Bio and Chem are widely available, so people with those interests could like smaller liberal arts and sciences college, medium-sized research universities, or larger research universities.
Any thoughts on campus style, setting (urban, suburban, rural, etc.), region, or so on?
Do you have any preferences or interests in type of college beyond academic programs/majors and playing tennis? General education requirements (or lack thereof), research activity, large/medium/small, region, rural/suburban/urban, fraternities/sororities (or lack thereof), etc.?
Have you decided what you want to do with a degree in biology or chemistry?
Are you thinking of possibly being premed and considering medical school? If medical school is a possibility, then you should budget for a full 8 years of university. If you ignore budget and attend private universities, then you could end up spending something like $900,000 over those 8 years. You might want to make sure that your parents are okay with this. Even doctors do not make enough money for it to be easy to pay off medical school loans.
If you are more interested in research, then some graduate degree is still a possibility. PhD’s are usually fully funded (with a stipend that is barely enough to live on, some “parent enhancement” of the stipend might help but it would likely be relatively easy for high income parents). Master’s degrees are usually not funded. You might want to figure on something north of $100,000 per year for two years for a master’s degree.
Otherwise I agree that your guidance counselor at a “Prep feeder school” should be quite good and should be able to estimate your chances at highly ranked universities.
To me you look competitive for highly ranked schools (Ivy League and other similarly ranked schools). However, so are most of the other applicants. You should look at these as reaches, even if you are a legacy student. Make sure that you also apply to safeties.
And of course you should be focusing on finding schools that are a good fit for you. You are likely to have many schools that would be happy to admit you (particularly at full pay), and should find one that you like.
You might want to visit some smaller schools (Bowdoin, Colby, Dartmouth College) and some larger schools (perhaps Harvard, Tufts, BU, Northeastern, …). You should also look at some schools for which admissions is safer, such as U.Maine or UVM or UNH or U.Mass. You also might want to think about how far away from home you would want to be (is Stanford something that you want to consider? It would of course be a reach, but does have good tennis facilities and a team). I do not think that I would fly across the country to attend a university that is just as good as U.Maine and only 2 or 3 times the price, but you might want to think about whether you want to fly across the country for a highly ranked school. Remember that if you are flying home for Christmas, even if you are somewhere like Stanford where you will not get snow at that end, you are still very likely to hit snow at your home end. We have had a child stuck due to a cancelled flight home or a cancelled flight back to school.
It is not necessary to attend a “top 20” university for your bachelor’s degree to do well in life, nor to get accepted to “top 20” graduate programs. We do have some experience with someone attending somewhat lower ranked universities for a bachelor’s and then attending a highly ranked graduate program. What you do as an undergraduate student is going to be more important than where you do it. I do think that you are competitive for “top 20” universities. This does not necessarily say whether or not you will get accepted to any of them, nor whether they would be a good fit for you.
The last wild thought that comes to mind is that since you are in Maine, Canada is not all that far away. We do have some experience with both the English language universities in Quebec (McGill, Concordia, Bishop’s) and a few of the universities in Eastern Canada. Let us know if you would like any information on them.
Will you - unknown - but statistically and EC wise you are there. Essays and LORs we don’t know.
If you’re a Maine resident, that will be another plus at many schools as they try to get all 50 states. I’m guessing the Vandy, WUSTL, Rice, Pomona types don’t see a lot of Maine.
Athletics is a different aspect - that could change your equation.
You wrote this:
" also wanna find the right fit for me! Any suggestions help!"
It might help if we knew what you liked - from environment type (urban, rural, etc.), location, weather, size, greek life and more.
Assuming your prep school isn’t in Maine you will typically not be considered as offering geographic diversity to private universities. Your “home state” per the admissions office will be determined by where your prep school is. This allows a geographic AO to be assigned to the prep school who has familiarity with the school and its practices across the student body.
Obviously if looking at a state school your family residency does matter.
The application will be evaluated by the AO handling the school. And NMSF status is based upon where the school is located. Or more accurately, the state in the region with the highest cutoff. But for classification purposes, the OP is a Maine resident. If the OP’s home address were London, they’d still be categorized as a UK resident.
Regardless, if you’re making the distinction for geographic diversity, it’s less important than many in small states hope it would be
Not what the AO at both Duke and Brown told my kid but I will defer to your experience. This wasn’t regarding NMSF but the schools consideration was based on the prep schools locations were told. Didn’t ask about International so that distinction makes sense.
We were told no geographic benefit given the benefit of the prep school itself was far more meaningful.
I forget which of the two schools it was at but we were specifically told you can’t “double dip” the benefit of going to an elite prep and then benefit from being from an underrepresented state. We also never saw prep school counselors adjusting up kids from Montana or other underrepresented states target school lists and or adjusting down those from more well represented states.