One more thought - if you can find a safety with rolling admission, that can take a lot of the emotional pressure off the application season.
One of my D’s safeties admitted her in early October. Even though it was not a top contender, she felt very good knowing that no matter what, she was going to be able to study engineering somewhere. It also changed her list some as she dropped one of the less competitive schools that she was considering because she liked this safety better, and she didn’t apply to honors college at the other safety for the same reason. Saved her at least 4 essays worth of time, and again, a lot of stress.
I’m leaning toward LACs in general at this point, they’re much easier to look at on the NPCs. However my family is somewhat conservative and it might be difficult to convince them to let me apply at a Christian institution. Is St. Olaf very grounded on the faith aspect?
There are two pastors, a rabbi, and an iman for students’ faiths.
I think that over the course of 4 years, you must take one course about the Bible in the community (how people have interpreted the Bible, not “the Bible is true and you must believe everything in it”), one ethics course applied to your major or profession or one of your choice, which can be about any religion or topic.
You take 9 courses per year.
I agree with @momofboiler1, except I would also look at Early Action schools. EA (as opposed to ED) is non-binding and does not limit how many schools you apply to EA, nor does it prohibit you from applying to another school ED.
So from your list you can apply EA to UMichigan, U Wisconsin & Reed. If you get into any of these EA, and you can afford it, you know you have your safety. If you don’t get in EA, I think you will have 2-3 weeks between being notified of that and when RD applications are due. It will give you a little heads up as to whether you should add or subtract some of the schools from your list.
Thanks @homerdog, that was helpful, and I should have looked up the dates before saying anything. All the colleges we looked at had the EA results come out in Nov or Dec. And IMO having them come out after RD is due kind of defeats the EA purpose.
if you are concerned about application fees but want to add more schools, there are plenty of schools that offer fee waivers to high stat applicants (ex: u of portland, fordham) that would be considered likely/safety schools for someone w ur stats!
AFAIK, no EA decison will come out of any competitive public university before the Jan 1 RD deadline for most private schools. Those schools have too many applications to review for them to be able to announce their decisions before year end.
Since mathematics tends to be a lightly enrolled major nationally, you may want to emphasize colleges at which this major is popular. You can use IPEDS to research this, e.g., College Navigator - Reed College. In comparing schools of various sizes, you can normalize for total enrollment.
Better would be to check the course offerings and faculty rosters at each school to see if the upper level math offerings match your interests (or that many areas are covered well by the upper level math offerings if you are undecided within the subject).
If you will be very advanced in math at high school graduation (i.e. math beyond single variable calculus while in high school), that may be particularly important. Depending on your interests, graduate-level courses available to undergraduates may also be important.
Some of the public universities with EA mentioned in prior posts have competitive admissions. Whether they should be considered as safeties is another matter. They may be for some applicants, but not for others.
Colleges usually reserve the best research opportunities for their own students. Students from other campuses often can’t choose which specific professor to work with. The level of financial support (stipends, etc.) also tend to be significantly different.
The summer REUs with which I am familiar are oriented toward about 10 students chosen on a competitive basis from a national pool, with stipends and, often, housing assistance and travel expenses provided. Within these groups, I’ve not heard of special opportunities available only to the minority of students (if any) from the host institution. In any case, a student can find many such programs to which to apply:
If they are nationally competitive with only 10 students chosen, no student should rely on getting one. Whether or not the student competes for one, it is best if the student’s regular undergraduate school has sufficient offerings to satisfy the student’s academic goals without needing another reach-level admission.
^My understanding is that REU programs are meant for students from colleges where there’re limited oppotunities for research. Host institutions are usually research universities and they set aside some opportunities for this program funded by NSF. They may be competitive among students from non-research colleges, but not with students from the host research institutions. Since the funding comes from NSF, stipends are meaningfully lower (at least compared to private research institutions).