That’s pretty good, but shotgunning refers to the pattern of pellets a shotgun makes. They are spread randomly over a general area. You can’t control where each one goes, but you point it in the general direction and hope that one of them hits the target.
Casting a wide net means you don’t know where the fish are, but the wider you spread the net, the more likely you are to get something.
I applied to 11 and have heard from 8 and have gotten accepted to all 8 and I can’t explain it.
SoapyMango: wow, between W&M Monroe Scholars, Amherst, Bowdoin, I wouldn’t know what to pick, and if you like large schools you’ve got an embarassment of riches too!!
COngratulations to you all, this is amazing 
Thank you MYOS1634! I feel very lucky. To tell you the truth, I have more choices than I anticipated and now I’m confused. I’ll be re-visiting my top picks. As an update, I heard positive news from Northwestern tonight and I’ll learn from 6 more at the end of the week.
My son applied to 14 schools and I think it was a mistake. “Casting a wide net” is definitely a good idea, but if we’d done more research we could have eliminated at least 4 of those schools. On the other hand, we had to apply to bunch, in order to try to get good merit aid offers, and it did seem to work. I just recommend narrowing it down as much as possible. It was a huge amount of work keeping up with all the requirements at all the schools and applying for special programs and scholarships, etc.
D did a lot of thinning before applying. She visited 20 schools, applied to 8 of those, and got into all 8 with merit awards. She followed the advice of her GC, and familiarized herself with what each school was looking for in terms of demonstrated interest, etc. Based on her experience, I’d say thorough preparation trumps casting a wide net. But I also recognize that this may not necessarily be true at the very top of the elite schools, where the huge numbers of well qualified applicants make it something of a crapshoot for just about everybody.
Well, I only applied to like 4 colleges 25 years ago and that was plenty sufficient lol. However, my D applied to 13 schools. She was casting a wide net for financial reasons. 4 were in-state publics affordable to us without aid, 3 were private/OOS public high merit potential schools, 6 were “meets full need” schools. In the end, she had 6 truly viable options (a few more acceptances but with “no gap” options, they were bumped off the list.) She went to a “full needs” school and is very happy.
A high stats kid has a better shot at those generally competitive “full needs” schools as well as substantial merit at a variety of schools. It makes sense to go after some different options. A kid with truly average stats might be wasting their resources playing the same game. In our area, we really only see high stats kids applying to so many schools… well, and BFA theatre kids who easily audition for 20+ schools because each program might only take 10 kids a year (and maybe only one of your “type.”)