College list recommendations

hyperbola
Sun, 04 Dec 2016 22:53:28 +0000

I’m a current junior in high school and I’ve realized I should probably get more active in the college search process!

I live in the Northeast (of the US) and would like to attend a school (of between 2000 - 10000 students) on the East Coast.

I’ve already visited Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Berkeley, and Duke which nicely coincided with family vacations! I didn’t like Johns Hopkins very much although I really liked Duke and Berkeley. Stanford was alright though, living in the East Coat, the Spanish style buildings and palm trees were something to get used to. Although my parents hated Berkeley, I really liked its sprawling campus.

However, as we drove around California, I realized I didn’t like it–I think I might think twice only for Stanford (which haha obviously would be a very once-in-a-lifetime opportunity). Berkeley I think there’d be schools of equal caliber on the East Coast which is why I’m not sure I’ll apply. In general I just HATED the weather and how cold it got at night.

My interests right now are very vague and undefined, but I think I may go into computer science so I definitely need a school that is relatively strong in that area. However, I definitely want to have a somewhat-structured liberal arts education and therefore wouldn’t want to go to a school that is specifically STEM focused like MIT. I want to take interesting English and history classes throughout college! I also really enjoy art so that is why I’m considering Brown since apparently students can walk over to RISD and take classes there!

My GPA is a 3.83, and although I haven’t taken the SAT or ACT yet, on practice tests I’ve scored around a 1570 or a 35. My extracurriculars aren’t especially strong.

I’m just very unsure how to start building a college list. I used a few college match search engines and the two schools that recurringly popped up were UPenn and Yale. Right now for reaches I have Yale (I know someone in computer science there and he says that although it is not the highest ranking school in computer science, it is still pretty strong and I think it might be a bit easier to get in–though obviously very very hard–for computer science at Yale in comparison to Stanford or Princeton, also I think it would have a very strong liberal arts education), Brown, Duke, UPenn, and Stanford.
I’m not very sure which other schools, especially matches or safeties, I should be looking at. Any recommendations at all?