<p>@ormdad I really don’t have much interest in going anywhere but my match and preferably reach schools. I understand the necessity of finding safety schools but I’m going to try my hardest to get to the best schools I can. </p>
<p>I’m a little afraid of QuestBridge college match. I have to find out more about the process but I don’t like the binding contract stuff or them essentially picking for you (if I understand what I read correctly). </p>
<p>With the Criteria of 4 year university, my SAT score, Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Majors, On- Campus Housing, tuition contribution of 1k (all must haves) and location as anything but rural or town not near major urban center (want) Supermatch matched me with the following 100%:
RIT*
Baylor University
University of San Diego
Wofford College
Florida IT*
Hofstra U
Union U
Seattle U
Marquette U*
Sienna College
U of Delaware
Depaul U*
Loyola Marymount U
Stony Brook U
Purdue-Main Campus U*
Marist College
Point Loma Nazarene
Belmont U
Ohio Northern U
Ohio Wesleyan U
U of Pacific
Colorado State U
Elon U
Goshen College
U of Utah
Loyola U Maryland
Austin College
Seattle Pacific U
UC Davis*
U of North Florida
U of Colorado Bolder</p>
<p>*schools I’ve ever heard of</p>
<p>A lot of these are out-of-state publics with little or nothing in the way of out-of-state financial aid and scholarships. Many of the private schools in this list do not have all that good financial aid either.</p>
<p>Just copied the list…Did I put the right criteria in?</p>
<p>This list includes some of the many schools for which you are a “fit” match or academic safety according to the data you put in and the algorithm used by the site you went to. I wouldn’t trust necessarily the financial part of the fit. That has to be checked school by school. There’s nothing on the list, save perhaps UCDavis, that is anything like a reach for you. In fact, I would call these low matches and academic safeties. I call them academic safeties because of the reasons I enunciated earlier. I think you can do much better than many of these schools. Ignoring the financial part of the equation, I would keep UCDavis, RIT, Florida IT, USD, Delaware, Purdue, Elon, and UC Boulder (where I went for u/g, so take it with salt). One of the other schools could no doubt provide you with an excellent 4 years, but I’m betting on these as academic safeties. Other posters will no doubt have other ideas. If you looked at the schools listed as 93-99% match, you would find schools that are closer to being matches and high matches as well as many more safeties, so don’t ignore the 93-99% if you want to do a thorough search.</p>
<p>@LeeMonet I was referring to QB College Prep Scholars. My understanding is that you should be getting some college counseling out of this program (as well as help with summer programs and fly-in programs).</p>
<p>For QB College Match, you pick and rank 8 schools. If you are matched, it is binding. If not, you can opt to have your application considered by the school in the regular decision round and don’t have to deal with getting fee waivers. You can also apply to other schools at that time.</p>
<p>One big drawback is that you have to submit your application in September, rank by some time in October and submit all materials by November 1. It’s basically like a REALLY early decision but for 8 schools instead of one. If you are not matched I’m guessing you can update your app with first term grades or any late testing you do.</p>
<p>Partner schools that you are an academic match for and have good CS depts:</p>
<p>Emory, USC, Grinnell<em>, Carleton</em>, Wesleyan<em>, Vassar. (</em> these might be low reaches for you).</p>
<p>Reach schools with amazing-to-good CS depts: MIT, Stanford, Brown, Dartmouth, Rice, Pomona (+ Mudd xreg), Swarthmore, Yale, Penn.</p>
<p>If you received a full ride to Emory or USC, would you be disappointed? Start with those two, add Pomona and Penn and then you have 4 to play with. Grinnell, Carleton might not be your cup of tea, but they have very good CS depts. I’d skip MIT/Stanford/Yale/Swarthmore since they are probably unattainable with your scores. Last two spots might go to Brown, Dartmouth or Rice depending on which ones you like the most.</p>
<p>There are lots of other great schools on the list that you are a good match for. But it seems to me that the strategy would be to apply to mostly reaches and a high match or two that you’d be happy with.</p>
<p>@ormdad I’d be ecstatic with a full ride to Emory or USC. If I were to predict right now I’d say thats probably where I’m gonna be next fall. I’m still horrifically uncomfortable with the binding match. I’m picky and I want to make the final decision… Would opting out of match hurt my chances for the full ride?</p>
<p>I’m very comfortable with that list you just made. Thanks for the explanation.</p>
<p>@jkeil911 I did the search as a search for safeties so I think I did it right by what your saying. I only listed the 100% because going further would have hurt my hand but I wanted to see what you guys said. I do understand the list doesn’t end there.</p>
<p>@LeeMonet that I cannot answer. My understanding though is that you are matched with your highest ranked admit. Could be more complicated than that. Most if not all of the QB schools meet 100% of need so frankly I don’t completely understand why a strong candidate would go through QB. Primarily I see it as an organization that helps qualified URM and 1st gen college students navigate the complicated admissions process.</p>
<p>BTW you still need to be selected as a finalist for College Match to be worrying about binding agreements :-)</p>
<p>@ormdad I’m going for maximum optimism lol </p>
<p>LeeMonet -</p>
<p>A lot of the concerns that you seem to have about Questbridge surely have been addressed by some of the posters in the QB sub-forum inside the Financial Aid Forum. I’d encourage you to pay a visit, and read some of those threads. Here’s the direct link: <a href=“Questbridge Programs - College Confidential Forums”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/questbridge-programs/</a></p>
<p>I don’t agree with ormdad that preparing your applications so early is a drawback. It is a huge advantage. By having everything ready very early on, you will have very little extra work to do to file applications anywhere else that interests you. I know a QB candidate who didn’t get a match, but did land a ginormous merit-based scholarship at a non-QB LAC the application cut off date for which was in October. If she hadn’t had her paperwork already completed for QB, she would not have been able to meet that cut off date.</p>
<p>To second what @happymomof1 is saying, there are lots of schools out there with rolling or early admissions that front-load their merit aid so that they can try to hook students who are really interested in much more prestigious schools. Pitt comes to mind in this regard. If you can apply to Pitt in September, and not all school districts will have the letters of rec available by that time, you have a much better chance of getting a lot of merit. Tulane is another. Case might be a third. </p>
<p>And don’t forget those schools that want to do fly-ins in October and November. They’re going to have to know about you early on. Your SAT scores right now won’t be enough to get the attention, probably, of Pomona, Amherst, etc. for them to think about flying you in. QB can help here.</p>
<p>Just so it’s clear, College Prep is the Questbridge program that helps candidates with applications to fly-in programs, and this happens at the end of August.</p>
<p>College Match does not help with this, it’s just about the college application process and the full ride scholarship.</p>
<p>But LeeMonet is a CP Scholar so she’s all set. :-)</p>
<p>@happymomof1 clearly if you are able to get the equivalent of 8 early decision applications done by November 1st, this is not a drawback. @LeeMonet will be swimming this fall and I would not underestimate the additional time needed to adequately prepare 8 supplemental essays for highly competitive schools.</p>
<p>But yeah, if she can get that done, it’s certainly an advantage.</p>
<p>Some of the schools named upthread like Emory have relatively small CS departments, so their junior/senior level CS course offerings may be limited, or may be offered infrequently. Small departments may also not have strong faculty representation in all of the subareas of the major. Check catalogs and schedules to see how suitable each school is in your intended majors.</p>
<p>@happymomof1 Hi, Thank you for the link. I think it would be both advantage and draw back. It means I have to find time to of course complete apps way earlier than I would have to w/o QB. It also means I’ve done 8(?) apps before schools even really started, don’t have to worry about it, and as you said have most of the work done for other apps</p>
<p>@jkeil911 Harvey Mudd sent me an email about their fly in program. I’m mostly finished with the app though it is not due til august. Are there many other fly in programs that a school itself does? Or is that something exclusively for QB CP?</p>
<p>QB admitted me in like April and not much has happened since then so I had kinda given up on much help from them. Good to hear they are helpful.</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus That’s a valid point. I did not think to check that. I’m such a curious person I’d probably pick the most obscure class there is and decide to be very interested in it, so it would be nice to have a wide variety. Thats one reason I was thinking I shouldn’t go to a purely tech school. Even if I don’t take the classes, I’d like to have a music major or psych major or whatever around to befriend and talk to. Academic Diversity if you will</p>
<p>I think all of the Claremont consortium schools do fly-ins, although I’m not so sure about Pitzer. Regardless, any of them would be a good to great LAC to attend because attending any one of them–Pomona, Mudd, Pitzer, and the all-women’s Scripps–gives you access to all the others, and all of them are within a 5 minute walk of each other. They’re particularly interested in URMs and women interested in science. Pomona and Mudd are as hard to get into as any 20 other schools, but if you get into one of the other two you can take much instruction from faculty and with the resources at Mudd and Pomona. Going to mostly male, CalTech-like Mudd, for instance, you could still befriend Italian majors at Scripps and business and polisci majors at Claremont and social and behavioral science majors at Pitzer, plus have contact with graduate students at Keck Graduate Inst. and Claremont Graduate U. </p>
<p>I don’t know much about fly-ins, OP, so I’ll let someone else speak to that. I do know however that many colleges and unis are interested in the unusual student, the girl from the small convent-like Catholic school in Nowhere, MT who grew up roping cattle and reading Horace and who excels at Latin and has won regional Westinghouse competitions. Admissions officers or faculty or administrators somehow hear of these students thru similarly quirky alumni perhaps, and they go recruiting with wallets in hand. Fly-ins are part of the sales job they do. (I’m not making up my example; she went on to write a thesis on Moby-Dick and Beowulf at one of the Seven Sisters and is now jumping into forest fires in Alaska and the northwest.) Those students are rare. Until you tell me otherwise, I’d say you’re not as rare as she was, but you’re in that direction along the spectrum from her to dime-a-dozen white, middle-class, public school, boring ECs, “pre-med” male from Pennsylvania or New York. What you’re trying to do, with the help of QB perhaps, is leverage the special person you are. </p>
<p>OP, Claremont McKenna College, as opposed to the Claremont Consortium, has an Interdisciplinary Science Scholarship for students who are interested in pursuing two majors, one a science and one a non-science. There are usu. about a dozen of these handed out each year, and they are directed at students from “lower income families.” I don’t know what is meant by that term, but it didn’t include my family. </p>
<p>CMC is not known for its science majors, so they’re looking to pump up their science students and cross them with their strengths in business and social sciences. Perhaps as a consequence, they don’t include math as a science major. So math would be your second major, let’s call it, and the “major” would have to be drawn from physics, chemistry, or one of several biology majors. Could you do that? </p>
<p>CMC has a math dept with pure and applied emphases, and they also offer a compsci focus within the math course of study. What other major you might choose there, I don’t know, but I know you could get credit for math courses taken in the consortium, that is, in schools that are stronger than CMC in math, like Mudd and Pomona.</p>
<p>Do check with a CMC AO. Here’s the url: </p>
<p><a href=“https://www.cmc.edu/admission/scholarships/iss/default.php”>https://www.cmc.edu/admission/scholarships/iss/default.php</a></p>
<p>Check the requirement to file your papers early.</p>
<ul>
<li>look at the colleges that BOTH offer merit scholarships for your stats and EA or Rolling Admissions, and apply in September/October through Early Action or Rolling Admissions.</li>
</ul>
<p>-your in-state flagship’s Honors program - apply as early as you can, within a week of the application(s) going “live”</p>
<ul>
<li>colleges that meet 100% need: most would be reaches or matches, but I think St Olaf or Gettysburg would be low matches or safeties (not sure but definitely rather “safe”).</li>
</ul>