<p>Keep Rice on your list, for sure.</p>
<p>You mentioned Vanderbilt originally, and I would encourage you to keep it in mind, for several reasons. It is the right size, all students will be living on campus beginning this year, they seem interested in attracting a diverse student body (at Vanderbilt that means they would like more Asian students), and the engineering school has merit scholarships. I don’t know much about chemical engineering there, but they have a fair number of biomedical engineering students who plan to go on to medical school.</p>
<p>Based on just a bit of personal experience with merit scholarship winners at Rice, Vanderbilt and Washington Univ., I think it is safe to say that all want to see very high test scores and extremely challenging course loads with good grades, but they also want to see a good extracurricular record, featuring a lot of real leadership and initiative. The conventional wisdom is that Wash U wants more evidence than most schools that you are serious about them, and I think that is true based on what I have seen. </p>
<p>I’m no expert on financial aid, so I won’t comment on your EFC. However, if you end your undergraduate years with 50K of debt, going directly to medical school will leave you paying off loans for a very long time. If you wanted to take your chemE degree and go straight to work, then 40-50K of debt might be manageable, since that is a field that pays well initially.</p>