<p>I want to go to the best school possible but I’m not sure what that is. I’m a senior so my stuff won’t change much and I’m really nervous about if I’m good enough to get into a highly ranked school like UVA, UNC, or Wash. U in STL. Please help me and if you think I can improve my resume please tell me. Thanks!</p>
<p>GPA: 3.8 unweighted</p>
<p>Class rank:18 of 287.</p>
<p>Extra Curriculars: Baseball; Mentor to Middle Schoolers; National Honors Society [Vice President]; Honor Flight (Helping War Veterans); Mentor to 2nd graders; Youth at the Booth </p>
<p>SAT: 690 CR, 630 M, 680 W, 2000 Total</p>
<p>ACT: 28 (Haven’t gotten my latest scores back yet)</p>
<p>Essays & Recommendations: Both are pretty good</p>
<p>You’ll have to work quickly and efficiently while still keeping up with your schoolwork. Talk to your parents about how much they can afford to contribute to your college education. Find out how much they’ll let you borrow (I say let because they will have to co-sign any more than a few thousand in loans). </p>
<p>On the schools in which you’re interested, all of them not just these upper ones, run the Net Price Calculator almost every school offers. It will produce a figure, the approximate amount that the school expects your parents to contribute to your education, in combination with what your parents have told you about their help and your loans will tell you whether or not you can afford to go to that school. Research about each school you are interested in how much merit and non-merit (for the latter the calculator is fairly accurate) support they might offer you based on your qualifications. Come up with a list of schools you might be able to afford. </p>
<p>I’ve gone through this process twice as a parent and am going through it again now. My experience suggests that, based on the numbers you’ve cited, none of the schools you name are guaranteed to take you and WashU is a big reach unless you have a “hook.” But there are lots of things I don’t know about you that really matter to schools of this caliber. Extracurriculars are one of them, and yours aren’t specific enough to help me here. You also don’t mention talents, special experiences, race, gender, class, state of residency, etc., all of which these schools will want to know. My D has stats like yours but her SAT is much higher. I hope your ACT comes back gold. She is not a lock for admission at any of these schools, but she probably could get in to all of them, WashU being the riskiest of them. Getting a lot of money from any of them is far from likely, however, given our residency and finances and her qualifications.</p>
<p>Final advice, and of course this is only my advice and you should definitely listen to your guidance counselors and other advisors, make one or two of these schools you’ve named a reach school (if you can afford perhaps to go there) and then aim most of your apps at lower ranked schools at which you’re a good fit. I hope you enroll at a school where you will thrive.</p>