Looking for suggestions, specific major + good merit aid

College Search & Lists
1

Here’s my list right now:

San Jose State
Cal Poly SLO (applying to industrial engineering, has a high acceptance rate for SLO)
University of Pittsburgh
MIT
Northeastern
UConn
WPI
University of San Diego

I’m also considering Harvey Mudd, Case Western, Hofstra, and Temple.

Relevant facts: CA residency, 1560 SAT, straight A’s in fairly rigorous courses, qualified for the NHRP, but not really any “hooks”

Finances: My parents say they can afford any school, but I know they can’t do that without loans, and if I don’t need to take out loans I’d rather not. I’m trying to keep the tuition+room+board - merit scholarships under 30k/year. We have a weird financial situation-- my parents are not particularly high income but have assets. There are some schools that say “Families making less than [more than my parents make] do not pay any tuition” but when I run the NPC it comes out as full pay. They also don’t want to talk to me about money and actually try to discourage me from being concerned about it.

I want to be an industrial engineer, so my schools need to offer either a major in industrial engineering, a related field (operations research, manufacturing engineering, systems engineering), or some program where you major in engineering and can have a significant concentration (like MIT’s course 2-A).

I’d really prefer a school in the northeast or PNW but I understand that I already have a lot of specific “must-haves” so that may not be possible. Going to a very religious school or living in a very religious area would be a problem for me though.

Thanks for your time!

2

SLO sounds like a great choice and well within budget. What’s your CSU GPA, SLO MCA??

3

@my2caligirls

I think my SLO GPA is a 4.24 (a-g courses taken in 9th-11th grade with max of 8 semesters of honors points).

How do you calculate the MCA?

Thank you!

4

See this thread from the Cal Poly forum re MCA http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/cal-poly-san-luis-obispo/1694769-confused-about-mca-score.html#latest

There are some folks on that forum who know SLO very well but your grades and test score looks competitive. They superscore as well.

5

@my2caligirls Thanks! Using that, my MCA is 4779.

Good to know they superscore, although I’ve only taken it once :wink:

IE actually seems to have a very high acceptance rate for SLO, because the goal enrollment is around 20% of applicants, so they probably accept at least twice that, right? (The engineering department as a whole has a goal enrollment of 7% of applicants, if I’m reading their targets/projections correctly).