Chance Me/Match Me Questbridge College Match Applicant [WA resident, 3.97 GPA in IBDP, 1530 SAT, biology, psychology]

Well, it depends.

If you Match through Questbridge, you get better-than-full-ride financial aid. You’ll be able to attend without financial strain, and graduate debt-free.

UW is a fantastic flagship university. But I doubt there’s any way for you to get through without debt. Have you priced out what the financial picture is going to look like if you go to UDub?

Once you’re clear on the cost difference, then I would ask you to do a thought exercise: put the 15-school limitation aside for a few minutes, and look at the whole Questbridge list. Given the cost difference between a Match offer and the financial reality of attending UDub, which schools on the QB Partner list would you choose over UDub, if you could attend for free? Which ones would you not choose over UDub, even with a full ride? You could undoubtedly get an excellent premed bio/psych education at virtually every school on the list, so that’s not a limitation.

All of the schools you listed are universities rather than liberal arts colleges. Is that because you genuinely dislike the idea of a LAC, or is it only because you referred to the USNWR “National Universities” list to identify the “top 15” schools, and thus ruled out the LAC’s which are ranked separately? Even if you don’t like small schools, you might like LAC’s like Pomona, Claremont McKenna, and Scripps, which are part of the 5-college Claremont Consortium with seamless cross-registration and 7000 total undergraduates on the combined campus.

What I would suggest, once you’ve compiled your master list of all the schools at which you’d choose a full ride over UW, is that you divide that list into three sub-groups. (I’d do this by acceptance rate, since there’s no obvious way to dovetail the USNWR rankings between lists, and the rankings are hardly gospel anyway.) Then, pick five schools from each sub-list… and don’t just pick based on rank; look at the campus environment/culture, the surrounding area, the academic programs, the extracurricular opportunities - whatever is important to you.

There is not a single unworthy school on the Questbridge list, but some will fit your personality and interests better than others. Is MIT really a fit for you, for example? Just because it’s highly-ranked doesn’t mean it’s better for you than Pomona or Rice or Tufts. It’s a vastly different student experience; and if you’re not truly well-suited to MIT, they’ll see that and it’ll be a waste of one of your 15 spots.

Are you female? If so, and if you like Columbia enough to put it on your match list, then why not Barnard, which is part of the same university? Even if you don’t want a fully single-gender college environment, there are lots of guys around at schools like Barnard and Scripps.

Anyway, the strategy I’m suggesting will still allow you to pick your favorites from among the most competitive schools, but it will also increase your odds of matching, for several reasons: 1) because you won’t be confining your options to the most over-requested schools on the list, and 2) because you’ll be filtering for fit, and hopefully AO’s, who are also looking for fit, will see what you see and perceive that you are indeed “right” for their school.

But first, see how many schools make the “I’d pass up UDub to go here for free” list, and then we can discuss how to pare down, seeking the best fit while balancing your list in terms of competitiveness and maximizing your chances of matching.

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