Is ten colleges too many to apply to?

kitkat231
Sun, 05 Mar 2017 23:53:40 +0000

@stanford200381
To answer your question, I think 10 is a manageable number. I applied to 19 (not including scholarship programs), and it was a hassle! So many essays, interviews, tours. But I wouldn’t have known what to cut from my list, since I wanted a good balance between reach, possible, likely, and safety schools (those are the categories my school uses).

For reference, here is my list (and before anyone says anything, my college counselor denoted whether a school was a reach, likely, etc. for me. Also I know that a lot of these schools are very different, and that’s because I didn’t really know what exactly I wanted in a college):

Reach:
Harvard
Yale
Brown
Columbia
UPenn

Possible:
Cornell
WashU
Georgetown
UChicago
Johns Hopkins
Tufts
UNC Chapel Hill
Barnard
Emory

Likely:
Boston U
Northeastern
URochester

Safety:
George Washington
SUNY Binghamton

On a personal note, I began going on College Confidential when I was in 8th grade too, mainly because I wanted to find summer programs and needed to learn how to apply to boarding school. I found CC to be extremely helpful for these topics, and using this site as a resource for these things (I believe) has helped me get into college. BUT I have also spent a significant amount of time procrastinating and stressing myself out on this site starting at a young age. I definitely think I could have spent this time in a more productive way.