Current Junior Match Me!/Searching For School Suggestions [IL resident, 3.7 UW, 1450 SAT, 33 ACT, pre-med path, $0-20k (uncertain) parent contribution]

Chance Me / Match Me
,
41

Which schools do that? I think I only know of Colby that is in that range, and I know MIT is starting that up this year. Are there more?

1 Like
42

I’m wondering if you were confusing Pitt with Penn State
.and Emory with its Oxford campus?

If not, both Pitt and Emory are considered urban colleges.

4 Likes
43

I fear I must’ve missed this. But I second that and would like to know where you find this.

44

I wasn’t confusing Pitt but for Emory, I went to an Emory campus but I honestly don’t know which one it was.

45

Pitt is definitely NOT in the middle of nowhere. It is in a really nice part of the city.

Emory’s main campus, if I recall correctly, is more suburban and is a short distance from downtown. It is also not in the middle of nowhere.

3 Likes
46

Okay that’s good. I heard Pitt is good for research and pre-med, the campus looks nice enough, and it seems to be pretty school spirited so I think I want to apply there and it’d be really great if I got in. Cost can probably work out its way idk.

Pitt’s CDS 2023-2024 says GPA is considered very important compared to other factors so since my GPA isn’t that high as is, would it be better for me to raise my GPA for first semester of senior year and then still work on ECs and then apply in January since it’s rolling admission?

for Fall 2024 first-year class, the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences has median SAT score of 1280-1440 and median ACT is 29-33 so testing is fine but not sure about GPA as the weighted GPA is 3.78-4.37 and I’m not sure how to calculate this because weighted GPA is calculated differently and my weighted is 4.9 but my uw is just 3.7 as of now so it seems wrong.

47

Pitt is one of my favorite schools and I think the campus is very nice.

I would not wait until January to apply- but that is only my opinion. The application opens early (or at least it used to) and you really want to get yours in.

3 Likes
48

You can’t afford Pitt. It’s in the Oakland neighborhood and urban but please take off your list. There’s zero reason to apply other than to get a not close to affordable admit.

An affordable sub would be UAB - urban and outstanding medical facilities, a leading teaching hospital. If you don’t need health insurance, tuition room and board today is $42k. But you’d get either $22.5k or $28.5k in merit aid so it’d hit budget. It’s Pitt, in many ways, but in the South. It’s not Pitt but it’s a Pitt lite you can afford.

You have a price point. You need to choose the right schools - not the desired schools. Thers a difference but that’s what merit chasing students must do.

Emory is suburban I’d say but not far from several urban Atlanta areas. it has a lot of medical nearby but not retail. It’s small two year school Oxford is rural. Emory meets need and has full rides but those are near impossible to get. So you could apply but have now expectation of you do.

1 Like
49

help you’re probably right. why are they so stingy :skull::pray:

50

Not quite to California, but what University of New Mexico?

The Lobo Undergrad Exchange Scholarship is a more or less guaranteed scholarship for stats that is renewable annually with 2.5 GPA. LUE, LUE Plus and Amigo also gives instate tuition costs for any summer sessions attended. The LUE Plus Scholarship will get you instate costs at University of New Mexico. The Amigo Scholarship will get LUE Plus benefits plus an annual stipend

COA (tuition, fees, housing, meals) is for '24-'25 is $23.5K/year.

Med school is directly across the street from one of the main dorms on the main campus. Research opportunities are good and UNM has a good track record of sending grads to professional and graduate school.

UNM is recognized as HSI and has diverse student body. (45.5% Hispanic or Latino, 31.2% White, 5.84% American Indian or Alaska Native, 4.3% Asian, 3.77% Two or More Races, 2.79% Black or African American, and 0.159% Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islanders.)

There is an international airport in Albuquerque with 90 minute direct flights to SoCal and NoCal.

5 Likes
51

Pitt will likely not be affordable if your parents will pay $25,000 a year.

I would focus on finding 2 schools that are affordable and where you can be happy. Once you have those schools you can apply to Pitt if you want, just in case it works out.

1 Like
52

One daughter is in the first year of a PhD program. One piece of good news is that PhD programs are usually fully funded. Typically a school will pay your tuition and fees and pay you a stipend. The stipend is designed to be enough to cover your cost of living, assuming that you live quite frugally. In my daughter’s case the university is also providing her with health insurance. I do not know whether this is normal, but it sounds like it might be.

Admissions to PhD programs can be very competitive. However, you have a lot of time to get ready for this.

This is definitely very true. Also, if you look at the graduate students in either very good medical schools or very good PhD programs you will find that they got their bachelor’s degrees at a very wide range of universities.

2 Likes
53

okay good point. I don’t really know how to find fit and affordable schools. I just don’t think I’d see myself in rural and conservative leaning schools so maybe diversity is pretty important to me as well as safety.

And I’ve mentioned before but I want to find somewhere good for doing research/pre-med. Good student life like clubs, activities, etc. Nice campus. Not too humid or freezing. Relatively safe location. Maybe with open curriculum/something similar?

Any suggestions ?

But I guess if you need financial assistance, can’t really ask for too much loll

54

Just to reiterate/summarize, you basically have three gating factors:

  1. What could your family hypothetically afford, according to meets-need schools? (for this, you do the online calculators and/but/also plan for failure – there was a very long thread last year that should serve as a cautionary tale.)

  2. What are your parents actually willing to cover? If they are at all sketchy about this, err hard on the side of caution. It would really suck to think you have a plan and need to reconfigure in August (or halfway through freshman year).

  3. Taking 1&2 into account, where are you likely to get in and want to go? This is the more fun part of the exercise and I don’t blame you for fantasy-shopping right now (heck, I wish my son had been even half as interested) but ultimately 3 is an exercise in frustration if you haven’t solved for 1+2.

More notes:
–there are a ton of “meets need” schools but their definition of need and your parents’ idea of what they’re willing/able to spend might not align.
–I wonder if sitting down with parents + school college counselor to get them on same page could be a good idea. Parents need to know what things cost/what your chances are. School college counselor needs to get a sense of what you’re up against if parents are stubborn/unhappy about idea of paying more than small set sum. Parents should also be aware of what borrowing limits are for students – if they’re assuming you can take out $150K of debt for undergrad, go to med school, become a rich doctor (LOL) and pay it all off, they probably need a reality check.
–I think you might be well-served at this point to do a bit more career exploration. Med school is hard + $$$$ path and if the goal is a stable, well-paying job, there are probably safer/smoother options. Any PhD program you’d want to do will pay for itself but if you’re thinking about academia, you’re looking at x years of PhD + at least one and probably two postdocs and then a frustrating job market. The biology PhDs I know have mostly segued into biotech and pharma. Anyway, I think a lot of people in high school don’t have much sense of what the job landscape currently looks like – what do people do? this would be a great thing to learn more about, in part b/c it will shape your school search.

For the ultimate cautionary tale, skim this thread: Chance me ED 2 Boston College, US[+Canada] citizen from small Canadian town weak ECs[4.0 UW, Test optional]

It’s a lot, but there are clear takeaways:
–figure out now answers to both 1) and 2) : what do schools think parents can afford, and what are parents willing to pay?
–since your parents are already being a little vague about this, have in your back pocket a couple of fail-safe options. They may not be your current dream schools but they need to work for the scenario in which parents say “what tuition?” or the FAFSA result looks different from what you thought it would. @AustenNut is a genius at sussing out options you might not have on your radar and @tsbna44 is one of the great CC bargain hunters.

Looking forward to helping you figure it all out!

Oh, one final thought – the mental health stuff sounds non-trivial. For me, the question would not be “should I mention it in applications?” (probably not, would be my thinking, but others such as @Mwfan1921 will have better-informed answers). Instead, I think the question should be “how can I put myself in a position to make the most of college, which would include stabilizing mental health to the best of my ability?” So, for example, a filter I might use when looking at schools would be on-campus health resources, access to pharmacies, state laws about prescription refills and/or remote therapy if you’ve found someone local who meets your needs, etc.

5 Likes
55

Although you’ve had a “U” in your performance, you still have a strong academic record that I believe will yield you merit aid at a number of schools. Whether you will be awarded sufficient merit aid to bring a school down to the desired level, I don’t know.

I focused on California schools and schools that were within 5-6 hours of Chicago (guessing that you’re somewhere in the metro area), as if proximity to family is important for your health, then I think that’s an important limitation to keep.

To develop this list, I consulted this site which lists the undergrad institutions of people who went on to earn a doctorate. I limited the timeframe from 2000-2018 and also limited it to biological and biomedical sciences. With two exceptions, I looked for schools that had at least 100 alums who earned a doctoral in the biological sciences as I took that to mean that the schools offer the kind of preparation necessary for students to succeed in grad school in that discipline (which I think also means that people would have sufficient academic preparation for med school, too).

Based on your description of your high school and the colleges that were on your original list, I suspect that name recognition is important to your family, perhaps with the belief that if a school was a good school that they would have heard of it. Thus, I’m going to share some ratios I did for a variety of schools, including several of the schools on your current list. The ratios for the schools on your current list are in bold. Thus, your family can hopefully see that the schools being suggested are also strong for your interests. The ratios are of the total number of bio doctorates earned as compared to to the school’s undergrad population and the number of bio doctorates earned as compared to the number of bachelor’s granted for biological and biomedical sciences in 2022-2023.

School # of bio doctorates 2000-2018 # of Current Undergrads Ratio of Bio Doctorates to Total Undergrads # of current Bio Bachelors Ratio of Bio Doctorates to Total Bio Grads (1-yr)
Oberlin 296 2,966 0.0998 74 4.0000
St. Olaf 235 3,074 0.0764 74 3.1757
DePauw 103 1,819 0.0566 37 2.7838
U. of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign 1074 35,564 0.0302 460 2.3348
Ohio Wesleyan 129 1,452 0.0888 56 2.3036
Luther 101 1,463 0.0690 44 2.2955
Hope 111 3,368 0.0330 52 2.1346
Macalester 144 2,142 0.0672 68 2.1176
Kalamazoo 131 1,196 0.1095 66 1.9848
Occidental 108 1,854 0.0583 55 1.9636
Denison 101 2,405 0.0420 52 1.9423
Truman State 187 3,302 0.0566 97 1.9278
Lawrence 104 1,410 0.0738 57 1.8246
Northwestern 378 9,157 0.0413 222 1.7027
Kenyon 108 2,184 0.0495 69 1.5652
College of Wooster 107 1,876 0.0570 72 1.4861
U. of Iowa 337 22,130 0.0152 232 1.4526
Case Western 286 6,186 0.0462 197 1.4518
Notre Dame 333 8,968 0.0371 248 1.3427
Southern Illinois – Carbondale 118 8,195 0.0144 97 1.2165
Calvin 109 3,053 0.0357 90 1.2111
Iowa State 417 25,332 0.0165 356 1.1713
Bowling Green State 157 14,014 0.0112 135 1.1630
Scripps 59 1,082 0.0545 52 1.1346
Cal Poly - Humboldt 162 5,594 0.0290 143 1.1329
New York University 266 29,760 0.0089 245 1.0857
Miami U. (OH) 325 16,478 0.0197 301 1.0797
Augustana (IL) 95 2,446 0.0388 94 1.0106
U. of Missouri 344 23,613 0.0146 343 1.0029
U. of Southern California 205 21,023 0.0098 217 0.9447
U. of Dayton 100 8,176 0.0122 118 0.8475
Western Michigan 107 13,026 0.0082 131 0.8168
U. of Wisconsin – Milwaukee 107 18,047 0.0059 133 0.8045
Saint Louis 126 10,519 0.0120 179 0.7039
U. of Kentucky 235 23,930 0.0098 366 0.6421
U. of Minnesota - Twin Cities 593 39,556 0.0150 933 0.6356
Santa Clara 68 6,249 0.0109 111 0.6126
Creighton 106 4,262 0.0249 174 0.6092
Michigan State 695 40,483 0.0172 1,221 0.5692
Fordham 67 10,307 0.0065 120 0.5583
U. of Louisville 103 16,194 0.0064 198 0.5202
Loyola Marymount 38 7,336 0.0052 79 0.4810
Loyola Chicago 177 12,487 0.0142 408 0.4338
Marquette 139 7,652 0.0182 326 0.4264
U. of Cincinnati 117 31,184 0.0038 387 0.3023
Grand Valley State 113 19,243 0.0059 388 0.2912
U. of Illinois - Chicago 181 22,107 0.0082 639 0.2833

To prevent this post from becoming even longer, I will do some chancing and commentary on particular schools in a separate post:

5 Likes
56

My kid with much lower stats and still got 20-30k/yr merit at several schools. Didn’t matter as final cost of attendance with tuition/dorm/food, etc was still 30-40k or more a year.

Focus less on prestige and merit and be sure to watch for final COA.

Indiana and Minn-TC will likely be too expensive.

Perhaps consider St. Louis U, Loyola Chicago, Marquette.

1 Like
57

First off, don’t confuse rural schools with schools in college towns. College towns tend to be awesome places to live with tons of stuff to do. Additionally, student bodies at colleges are more likely to lean liberal than conservative, with a few exceptions (like Calvin on the list I shared above). So even if a school is in a conservative state, that does not mean that the school itself is conservative.

Nearly all schools are going to have clubs, activities, etc.

Not too humid or freezing
well, if we’re looking for geographic proximity to home, that might not be so easy.

Relatively safe location? Colleges tend to prioritize student safety and have lots of patrols and safety mechanisms in place. There are also reports you can look at to see what crime is like on a campus, though note that not all crime gets reported. Also, what kind of crime are you concerned about? Having your laptop or bike swiped from a public area? Or being sexually assaulted at a party when someone slipped something in your drink?

Open curriculum? Take a look at Kalamazoo and its K-Plan. It’s very wide open. It’s a small school that does great at prepping students for grad school, but it’s also in the same town as Western Michigan which adds about 14k extra undergrads to the town. Students are able to cross-register at the other institution as well.

Okay, I’m posting this and then I’ll get back to that earlier list I keep mentioning


5 Likes
58

Well more like name recognition and ranking is important to my high school’s admin team. I only heard of these schools listed from other grads at my school then I looked at the school’s campus in pictures, CDS, and opportunities and thought it was ‘cool’ which is why I put them down and kind of surfed through top 125 colleges on USNews. Honestly my parents don’t really care anymore as long as the school’s affordable, decent, and close to home (after seeing a dip last year in grades).

But thanks so much for your input and the table! It was very helpful.

59

Ok thanks I’ll keep that in mind. Sorry for the assumptions. I just meant I’d prefer to attend a school with ethnic diversity whatever that’ll look like.

Yes, I think I just have specific clubs and activities in mind that I’d like to join.

Hmm yeah I see. Like Mexico tends to be pretty humid even during winter months so not to that level. And for freezing, just don’t want to see a lot of blizzards or negative temperatures and hypothermia.

For safety, I’m more concerned about r*pe, being drugged, violence, and living.

ok thanks! i’ll look into Kalamazoo.

60

First off, you can do pre med anywhere. And research - just ask. So finding places where it can be done - people act like it’s limited. It’s not

Second, budget is 1,2, and 3 of importance. Until you see your parents need level or they increase the budget, you are limited in where you can go.

Third, don’t assume lack of diversity before your research. You saw UNM’s breakout in a previous note. UAB is 48% white.

Finally, New Mexico is a liberal state. Alabama not. Both will hit budget. But don’t assume a school is like the state. For example many here tell LGBTQ kids not to go to U of Alabama, which has the McCullough Scholars (pre med) I linked above. Yet theur Campus Pride is a 4.5 of 5 rating and here’s what one parent on the cc wrote at the bottom:

Bottom line - you will ultimately have to choose from a school you can afford and you will have trade offs.

Many of the high merit populations have huge OOS populations - Bama 1500 from Illinois, 2k from the NY/NJ/CT area. Don’t assume but visit, talk to people, research because you don’t want to let a good opportunity go by.

From @Peruna1998 in April 2023 - so your homework and don’t listen to stereotypes, especially when you have a price point issue.

I’ll toss my $0.02 in here. My S22 and D24 are both gay. S22 goes to Alabama. Many on here would question why would a LGBT student go to Alabama (NMF Scholarship, anyone?). I mean look at the Pride Index. Well
S22 has many friends on campus. All of them are gay. He will be rooming next year with trans-students. Except with one minor issue, he has had no problems on campus all year. One would assume that on a campus of 30K+ one minor issue would occur at some point. So, what’s my point. The Pride Index is great, but don’t let it necessarily drive your decision. Any large, public university will be welcoming to all groups. All students will find their people. As an aside, Alabama was one of the first public universities to sponsor LGBT organizations on campus. It became such an issue in the state that in the 1980’s the university had to offer special scholarships to entice in state students to attend
of course, you don’t hear that because
Alabama.

1 Like