White female from North Carolina
US citizen
Selective Private high school
Biology Major, interested in genetics, ecology
4.0 uw, 4.5 w
1570 SAT / 36 ACT
Top 10% of class (school does not numerically rank)
AP chem
AP bio
AP lit
AP Latin
AP calculus BC
AP psych
AP US history
10 other honors courses (hs weighs honors same as AP)
200 volunteer hours
National Merit Scholar
NC Governors School - summer
Scholastic Gold Key writing awards
National Latin and Greek exams gold medals
President of 3 clubs
Technical theater leader
1 year of cross country
No demonstrated financial need, will pay full price
Schools
Cornell (ED)
Wellesley (maybe ED2)
Duke
Wash U
Wesleyan
Vassar
Bryn Mawr
UNC Chapel Hill (in state)
Need additional safety/target suggestions - Midwest and East, not west
You are a fine student - but you have Wellesley and Bryn Mawr - so how about Smith, or Mt. Holyoke.
You have Vassar - how about a Connecticut College or Skidmore (loves full pay), Union College (loves full pay) or F&M (also loves full pay).
You have Duke - how about Furman? Brandeis? Rochester? Case Western - loves full pay.
U have UNC - how about other large flagships - like a Pitt, Delaware, UMD?
You can really go in any direction.
You have national merit - if you’re a semi finalist and yes you may consider it South, but you can go to very good U of Tulsa for free. So full pay is nice - but perhaps your parents like saving hundreds of thousands of dollars?
Anyway, there’s some more schools to think about. But remember, you only need - let’s say two safeties that you’d be excited about - so you don’t need to load your list (unless you want to).
Add NCState as a target. Should be an easy admit for you but I’m hesitant to call it a safety.
You are a good candidate for UNC and I’d think you’d get in but again no guarantees. So that’s also a target. Some people think UNC has a limit per county but they say they don’t. If you are from Wake or Meck it could be a more competitive admit for you than if you were from Bertie or Yancy.
Any of the other N.C. publics would be safeties for you for sure.
Does your school/counselor have information on previous applicants? I know they will for UNC and Duke and Cornell but maybe not on the others. I don’t usually do chance me but I think UNC and Bryn Mawr are good (not safety). D20 looked at some of these schools and found it hard to come up with “safer” schools that she liked. She considered Conn College, BC, Villanova, Lehigh, Richmond, Wake, Davidson, Skidmore. Good luck!
Clarifying so that, if you list it on applications, you list it correctly.
The path is NMSF → NMF-> NMS
National Merit Semi-Finalists (NMSF) apply to become National Merit Finalists (NMF). The vast majority of NMSF become NMF.
In March 2025, some NMF will be awarded a scholarship that turns them into a National Merit Scholar (NMS). A NMF who does not receive a scholarship does not become NMS.
There are three types of scholarships that will convert a NMF to a NMS.
NMSC’s $2500 NMS Scholarship (awarded in March, 2025)
A corporate sponsored scholarship - usually because one of your parents works for a company that sponsors a scholarship
A college sponsored scholarship. These scholarships are not the big package scholarships that you read about. They are usually less than $5K over the four years. They should be awarded sometime in April, 2025.
Some universities offer scholarships for semi-finalists. Tulsa has an amazing NMSF package. Many of the other big National Merit scholarships are for NMF (ex. Alabama, USC, BU, UTD).
In thinking of schools that could be a good fit for you that have particular strength in ecology, the ones in Maine stick out to me.
Colby, Bowdoin (~2K undergrads each) and University of Maine (~10K undergrads). U of Maine is an interesting option because of its unusual strength in your fields of interest, and it would be cheap for you (that extra $$ would free you up to do a zillion other fun things). Could be a great safety.
You’ll get a good bio education at any of the schools you’re interested in. But some schools are particularly strong in certain subfields. Evo/eco focused departments are special, and I think you’d thrive in one. A fun exercise for you to learn about a school’s activities in your field of interest is to search this site for the school’s name and see which awards describe things in the bio realm:
For example, if you search “Bowdoin” and then click on “Direct for Biological Sciences” and “Directorate for Geosciences” in the left panel, you’ll see that Bowdoin has 5 active NSF awards in your fields of interest. That gives a rough sense of how bustling the research is in your field at a given institution. You have to go back to the original search page to get the right results for a new institution.