<p>I think most of the schools I applied to were reaches. In America, I only did Harvard, Yale, MIT, UChicago, Georgetown, Swarthmore, and Dartmouth. At least the first three are definitely reaches.
I actually decided not to apply to my safety, OSU, before I had any acceptances in America. OSU has a special deadline of Dec 1 for scholarship consideration, and I let the deadline pass when I had only been accepted to schools all the way in England where I probably, in retrospect, would have been unhappy anyway. Of course, if my EA results from MIT, UChicago, and Gtown had been bad I could have applied to UMich (which I had already visited), along with other schools, with plenty of time, and everyone I know always gets in. And, of course, my guidance counselor thought I would certainly get into UChicago. But it probably wasn’t the best decision to make.</p>
<p>Choose your number of reaches based off of your stats. If you’re in the range of schools that are “reaches for everyone” (HYPMS) you should have quite a few reaches, perhaps equal to or greater in number than your matches. Your number of matches should be about 75% of your reaches. And I really think you should have two safeties. A lot of people on CC just have one, which usually means they just applied to the flagship state, or a local public if the flagship is too selective. I think having two forces you to actually consider your safety schools.</p>
<p>But I totally didn’t do that. /hypocrisy</p>