Chance Me Safety,Match, Dream?

aspiringauthor7
Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:41:13 +0000

Based on your list, none of your schools are really safeties. They’re all large universities and they all have varying levels of competition; for example, UCLA gets well over 100,000 applications a year, the most applied-to school in the country. If a big school is where you want to be, then these are great choices. If you like a more intimate learning environment where you get more attention to shine, I’d add some smaller schools with less students. Bigger fish, smaller pond kind of thing. You clearly have a lot of great ECs, but I have a bit of advice:

Don’t interpret your volunteering experiences as a number of hours earned. You could spend a million hours doing something, but if it doesn’t matter to you and if you don’t walk away a better person, there’s no point. If you do things for the sake of your resume that you aren’t passionate about, then that’s a lot of time wasted on your part. Of course colleges like to see involvement and a well-rounded student, but your integrity and your heart also matter to them (this comes through in the essays). Doing things that matter to you, learning about things you’re interested in, and supporting causes you care about is the reason to volunteer, not to bolster an application. So going forward, be careful about that mentality.

Your legacy status (yes, a sibling counts as a legacy) will give you a leg up at UMich, but getting into any big school’s STEM majors is going to be difficult (I’m assuming you want to do STEM because of your resume). They’re often impacted and extremely competitive (re: UCLA) so just know that even with a fantastic application, if there simply isn’t enough space for you, they’ll toss you in the reject pile. Your essays are where you can give them your pitch and truly convince them that you’re the perfect student for them (if you look at some of my other replies, I’ve written about this more extensively).

TL;DR You might consider adding some smaller schools (reputation isn’t everything), and taking stock of your resume and thinking about what you want out of life and your experiences. Best of luck, and I’d say your in-state schools are the “safest,” though all your choices are stellar.