Chance me/Match me: great stats, mid ec (no leadership) premed kid, needing no aid {1570 superscore, 3.95? GPA)

Chance Me / Match Me
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Demographics

  • US Citizen
  • New York
  • Semi-Competitive Public
  • Korean Female

Potential Majors: Biology, Neuroscience, Computational Biology, Medical Anthropology

GPA, Rank, and Test Scores

  • Unweighted HS GPA: Our school does a 100 point system where I have about a 98
  • Weighted HS GPA (incl. weighting system): None
  • Class Rank: School doesn’t rank
  • ACT/SAT Scores: 1570 superscore (780 EBRW, 790 Math each), taken 3x

Coursework
AP Biology (5), AP Chemistry (4), AP Stats, AP Calc BC, AP US History, AP Psychology (5), AP CSA, AP Lang (5), AP World (5)
Next year:
AP Gov, AP CSP, AP Macro, AP Physics C

Awards

  1. NHS lol
  2. AP Scholar w distinction lol
  3. USABO honorable mention lol
  4. Presidential Gold and Bronze Volunteer award

Extracurriculars
Violin: played in high level school orchestra 9th and 10th, self studied 11th due to scheduling issues. Attended All State every year except 11th since like 5th grade.
Science Olympiad: (10,11) Met for 6 hours each week, placed top 10 at states and 1st at regionals
Research with professor at local college: Looking to publish paper in journal soon!
Internship at local hospital: 50 hours of shadowing in OR and assisting nurses
Internship with professor this summer: Helping with statistical research using R.
Project with nonprofit: We studied barriers with language learning. Trying to not dox myself but we had a lot of discussions with the Korean school board and with students to come up with a better plan for future school year.
Volunteering: (100 hours ish per year) at various places including summer camp for refugee children.
Varsity Soccer: (10, 11) Tbh I suck real bad and do not start but I have fun!
FBLA: attended states and nationals, placed well at states but did not place at nationals

I’m looking to hopefully get a job as a cashier soon over the summer and also hoping to do some clinical shadowing.

Essays/LORs/Other
Essays will probably be pretty good, probably not amazing.
Generic LOR from counselor, decent ones from Psych and CSA teachers

Cost Constraints / Budget
I have basically no budget which I’m very grateful to my parents for, I’m pretty sure we don’t qualify for any aid anyways.

Schools
Safety: Stony Brook, UPitt, Bing
To be honest, I have no idea what targets and reach’s are like for me and I have no idea what is realistic for me.
Extremely tentative list below of any schools on my radar, def not certain. Please give me advice on the schools on the list and recommend some others to me!
Case Western, Carnegie Mellon, JHU, UMich, USC, UCLA, UCSD, UCB, Cornell, Brown, Vandy, Emory, Dartmouth, Swarthmore, Colgate, Duke, Colby

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This site, while not particularly special in its inclusions, may nonetheless offer you some suggestions complementary to the schools on your tentative list:

Within Maine, for example, perhaps look into Bates.

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Congrats on your achievements so far. You can complete the courses required for pre-med at any school that offers the majors you are looking at.

It’s great that Stony Brook and Bing are on your radar because they will be relatively low cost. Will your parents pay for med school too, or does that depend on how much undergrad costs? If you don’t know, talk to them about that.

I’m not sure I would call your SB, Bing, or Pitt safeties but make sure to get your app to Pitt in by the end of August and you should hear back from them by end of October with good news.

Your tentative list is pretty disparate in terms of location, vibe, setting…for example, I don’t often see Case and Colgate on a final list (knowing your list isn’t final.) What qualities do you most want in a school? Have you visited all these schools or done virtual admissions sessions? I would encourage you to look at more liberal arts colleges too.

Any chance you will be a national merit semi finalist? What math class will you have senior year? How many years of foreign language have you taken?

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I think two schools that would be targets for you, and have well regarded computational biology programs (in addition to UPitt) are UMD and Virginia Tech.

More info here and here.

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Apply to Pitt early. Are you looking at Pitt’s medical GAP? It’s very competitive but you would be you would be in the mix. You would also be competitive for Honors and some named scholarships.

CMU isn’t for everyone. It’s very much a “right fit” school. Visit and see if it’s a fit.

To each there own but if full pay is an option I’m not sure I’d apply to large, expensive public schools like the UC’s. Unless they offer merit or other perks like an honors program. Better resources and attention from smaller schools.

Other than that your list looks reasonable. Some safeties with a bunch of reaches. Good luck.

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Fine student - and great you have no cost constraints. But please factor in grad school.

Part of your greatness is your SAT. The UCs won’t see them. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t apply but just making you aware if you weren’t.

To me your list seems like a lot of big names. Have you visited all? You have large, mid size, and small - but all big names. You will have huge competition at said big names - whereas a lower tier school might allow you to stand out and make more connections.

What does Colby and Colgate have in common with U Mich and UCLA? More with Geneseo.

What do you really want in a school?

And what can UCB or Michigan give you for pre med that a SUNY can’t? Again, you have to pay for med school.

No issues with your list - but I’m hopeful it’s a list of schools you want to attend after visiting or learning more about them and not simply a list of big name that you know little about other than a rank.

Here’s a list - maybe helpful - but Ohio State is rated higher for medical anthropology than your list (and gives great merit and would be safe for you). SUNY Geneseo is on it too although I don’t see the major.

Certainly you have admits on your list. But is your list properly constructed? At first glance it doesn’t appear so but only you know what’s important to you.

Best of luck.

2024 Best Medical Anthropology Schools (collegefactual.com)

2024 Best Computational Biology Schools (collegefactual.com)

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As an academic aspect to consider, computational biology overlaps with data science. You might, therefore, benefit from including colleges with an available major in data science on your list.

Also, if you have a particular interest in neuroscience, note that Amherst established the first undergraduate program in this field.

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Would you consider adding Buffalo to your list of SUNY schools? @aunt_bea can elaborate.

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I would add SUNY Geneseo and the U of Rochester.

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I’m not sure if you’ve visited Colgate yet, but if you haven’t, I highly suggest you visit Hamilton College as well, which is only 20-30 minutes away. Hamilton has an extremely open curriculum and a lot of students have pre-med concentrations, including biology and neuroscience concentrations; my daughter is a rising sophomore there with a neuroscience concentration. They are known to have a high percentage of students admitted to med school.
I truly can’t say enough good things about it! My daughter considered both schools, but Hamilton won out. Absolutely beautiful, spread out campus with a lot of green space. A bit more of a suburban feel than Colgate, which presents as a more rural setting. Of course, a lot of it is going to come down to personal preference; it’s a bit difficult to determine what setting you’re looking for due to your varied list.
At any rate, if you’re visiting that area, I highly suggest you check out Hamilton! Sounds like it could be a good fit!

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That’s a great position to be in, but keep in mind that if you do go to med school, that is EXTREMELY expensive. It’s not a bad idea to start putting some money away for that now. For that reason, I would nix the UCs and some of the other high price tag schools that don’t offer merit making it likely you’ll pay the full price, and I would focus on schools that are either more affordable or that offer big merit. It’s great that you CAN pay for any school on your list, but that doesn’t mean you SHOULD. If med school is a possibility, you have to think long-term.

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Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure I won’t qualify for National Merit. For senior year I’ll be taking Calc III and Linear Algebra at my local public university and I have taken Spanish in (8, 9, 10).

Honestly the list was just me dumping any college that interested me on a list, I’m def going to be visiting many of them and then narrowing it down based on my preferences. I haven’t had time to really visit yet and I’m still not very sure on what I really want.

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I was thinking about Pitt GAP and also the program at Case but from some little research online, I was thinking that I don’t really have the clinical hours needed for acceptance into these programs. Thank you!

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Yeah you are completely right! This list was just any school that has interested me slightly and I definitely need to do a lot more research to figure out what school fits me the best. I haven’t visited any yet. Thanks for the Ohio State rec, I’ll look into it more.

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Yeah I absolutely would! I’d love more information about it!

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First of all, you are doing very well. Also, your safeties are very good universities, and two of them are very good in-state public schools.

Secondly, since I see “premed” in your post, you should budget for a full 8 years of university. Medical school could very easily cost $125,000 per year by the time that you get there. You should double check whether your parents are really okay with paying perhaps $900,000 by the time that they call you “doctor”. If they cannot do this easily without debt and without any hardship for your family, then it probably makes more sense to save money for your bachelor’s degree rather than to save money through your choice of school for an MD or for some other type of graduate program. Given that two of your safeties are very good in-state public schools, saving money for your bachelor’s is indeed possible (and may be relatively easy to do).

The “big name” universities do get a higher percentage of their graduates into medical school. However, a LOT of this, and maybe even all of this, comes from the level of student who starts off as incoming freshmen at these big name universities. Any one very strong student is not necessarily any better off starting off as an incoming freshman in the middle third of students arriving at Cornell or Dartmouth College relative to being in the top third of incoming students at Stony Brook. Also, even with your superb results up to this point, you might hope to be in the top 1/3 of students at some of these schools, but there will be plenty of other students in your premed class who are just as strong. I have known some of them (both daughters had majors that overlapped a great deal with premed classes). Premed classes will be very demanding, and you might be surprised at the consistent high quality of the other premed students at a wide range of universities (which is encouraging news to anyone who might need a doctor in the future).

You can major in almost anything and complete the premed requirements and apply to medical school. The potential majors that you have listed are good ones, overlap somewhat with what my daughter’s majored in, and could also lead to other potential careers. Many or most of these other potential careers involve some sort of graduate school. PhD’s are usually fully funded, but master’s degrees are usually not. Most (not quite all) of the people I have known who got a PhD first got a master’s degree on the way. If you save money for medical school and instead end up studying let’s say cellular biology, the money that you saved can still be very useful to fund a master’s degree.

You have some very large schools on your list (eg, UCLA, Michigan) and some very small schools (Dartmouth, Swarthmore). You have schools in cold locations with real winters (Dartmouth, Cornell) and schools in very warm locations with a lack of winter (Vandy, UCLA, USC). You have schools in big cities and schools in small towns or rural areas. Think about what you want in a college or university. Think about what location you want to be living in for four years. Also think about the long airplane flights and waiting in airports for a flight home. Would this get old after a while?

I do not see the allure of long flights to be full pay at the various universities of
California. They are very good schools, but so are the public schools in your state as well as other public universities in states that are nearer you and where merit aid is very likely (which it is not for an out of state student in California).

In terms of extracurricular activities, you have a rather long list. I think that you should focus on doing whatever is right for you, and doing it well. It is better to have a short or moderate length list of things that you do very well, rather than a long list of things that you do moderately well. You might want to read the “applying sideways” blog on the MIT admissions web site. While MIT is not on your list (possibly for good reasons) the same approach of “do what is right for you and do it very well” has worked for us in terms of admissions to a number of very good universities, most of which were not MIT.

Mostly I think that you are doing very well, and you are a competitive applicant at any university in the US. Keep up the good work, make sure that your safeties really are safeties, and best wishes.

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I think you’re underestimating yourself. You miss 100% of the pitches you never swing at. Take a swing.

A student from my S20’s high school class was fortunate enough to be chosen. Essentially a full ride and guaranteed med school. Pitt has a pretty good med school. It’s worth a shot. Good luck.

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Our eldest daughter had similar scores and got into top tens along with the UC’s. We’re in California. She selected Buffalo because she received a full ride to Buffalo. The clincher, UB had an honors program that linked UB to medical schools in NY. She thought she was going to become a physician and go to med school in upstate NY.
Then she took a course in biomedical engineering, and discovered that she really excelled and liked the engineering aspect. She changed her major to “double major” in what we have at the UCs called “EECS” (Electrical Engineering & Computer Software). It took her 5 years total (takes 4 years at the UC’s).

She had an excellent education there and returned to California and is killing it with promotions and income. She was one of the youngest managers promoted and continues to go up the corporate ladder and has authored procedures manuals for a corporate engineering firm. This all probably may not have happened if she hadn’t attended UB.

I don’t know if they still have that program but you can ask UB.

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It looks like you do have some! I’m not sure all what’s on your plate this summer, but do you have the opportunity to do more of this from your OP: Internship at local hospital 50 hours of shadowing in OR and assisting nurses? Or possibly volunteering at a hospice or assisted living center? The plus of those activities is that they really help crystallize whether or not one wants to become a physician.

Regardless, I agree with chmcnm to apply to Pitt GAP.

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