True - but if National merit, then Tulsa, Alabama, UTD and other GREAT schools come in at free or near free - and then you have great funds to pivot to grad school!!!
If that’s a route of interest to OP, of course…
True. The reason I brought up USC’s NMF scholarship is because of these two comments:
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I wonder what other west coast schools have good ones!!!
Initially I thought WC and then I saw MIT and Columbia.
Here’s a 3rd party list - i only see few out West on there (interesting) but ASU and Washington State. Santa Clara shows a small stipend.
Of course with any third party list, you have to vet.
USC is great too - of course.
Of course, OP has to get NMF - but they have a fantastic profile regardless.
Selective Colleges Offering National Merit Scholarships (■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■)
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To research NMF/NMSF scholarships, I would look at the thread that @fiftyfifty1 linked to above, or the National Merit Forum.
SLO awards a small NMF scholarship. They don’t publicize it, and don’t run it through NMSC (meaning that you don’t have to declare SLO as your first choice). I believe it is still $3K/yr.
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There are other mid-size private universities in the East that I consider similar to MIT in terms of tech focus, lots of high-end research, lots of people going on to grad school, and so on, but are somewhat less selective and in fact might offer merit to a sufficiently high numbers kid.
Like another person suggested RPI, and I agree that would be a really obvious option to check out given your mix of interests.
Then not with quite the same tech focus, but with again with a lot of high-end research, grad school placements, and so on in Physics and Math specifically, I would suggest checking out Rochester.
Finally, for smaller colleges great in these areas for undergrad education and grad placement (except maybe engineering, but yes for Physics, Math, and CS), I would suggest checking out Williams, Swarthmore, Haverford, and Carleton (not merit schools, unfortunately, but all very academicky and obviously quite different from a large public). Williams and Swarthmore are very reachy, but Haverford and Carleton, while still very selective, are maybe a notch less so.
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Note that Apker candidates from HMC compete in the non-Ph.D. granting division.
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If you are happy to live at home at attend community college, especially if you have one of California’s very good options near home, I think you have the exact definition of a safety, congratulations!
Given your interests, UT Austin might be worth an addition to your reach list. Specifically the Turing program. Your extracurriculars seem very CS focused and the rest of your accomplishments are aligned with what they are looking for. The CS department at UT is in the College of natural sciences which houses both the Math and Physics departments. Between you AP’s and Dual enrollment credits you may be able to easily chart out a double major.
The public colleges in Texas have paths to obtain residency which can bring the costs inline to the UC’s when accounting for all four years. Even without considering that, the Turing program is (in my opinion) one of the programs worth paying OOS costs for.
Your interest in STEM may make you well-suited to tech-oriented schools such as Harvey Mudd, Caltech, MIT, RPI and Rice. You also may benefit from considering schools with notably flexible curricula, at which you would be free to take virtually all of your classes in fields such as physics, math and computing. Amherst, Hamilton and Brown represent schools of this type.
This brings up an important point which may or may not impact the OP one way or the other: The Claremont colleges Graduate School is completely separate from the other colleges and has its own faculty. My understanding is that access to their research and facilities is limited to seniors. At Brown and especially at Wesleyan University, the principal investigators (P.I.s) are much more likely to teach undergraduates and want them to participate in their research.
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Rochester does not quite have the same sort of open curriculum, but I would also suggest it is at least relatively flexible.
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