I’m a high school junior looking for match and reach schools outside of my home state, Virginia.
GPA (weighted): Currently, 4.19. After my junior year courses are added, 4.37.
GPA (unweighted): Somewhere around 3.8.
SAT: 1480 (720 Reading/Writing, 760 Math). This was my first time taking it, so I’m planning on retaking it for the writing section. Predicting final score of around 1500.
Extracurriculars: Presidential Volunteer Service Award (2015-2016): 100+ service hours in a single year. PVSA (2016-2017): 250+ service hours in a single year.
-Member of my county’s Youth Leadership Program, in which over 100 students applied and 30 got in.
-Internship with my county’s government this upcoming Summer.
-Four years on my Unitarian Universalist Church’s Youth Adult Committee.
-Current officer-elect for my school’s student government.
-Three additional Internships: One at my church, one at a nature center nearby, and one at a local food drive organization. All of these were approximately three months long.
-Math tutoring
Next year activities:
-Writing tutor at my school
Honors Societies:
-Math Honor Society
-National Honors Society
I’m fairly flexible with my college choices, but I’m not interested in liberal arts colleges and I’d prefer a medium-sized school. I’m lucky to have parents who plan to fully support my undergraduate costs (however, financial aid would be nice). My family’s current annual gross income is approx. $125,000. I’m interested in a lot of different potential majors, such as Psychology, Engineering, Mathematics or Statistics, and Business.
Thank you!
Have you checked out Northwestern? You seem to have lots of different interests, so their curriculum/quarter system might be for you. It allows you to try out lots of different classes. Also, I heard it’s pretty easy to switch between schools there. On the other hand, there won’t be much aid (but that’s true for most matches and reaches) and the weather might be a little out of your comfort zone.
Btw I am very biased because I’m an incoming freshman there…
For others on here, it might be helpful to know your thoughts on rural vs urban, south vs north, greek life etc
$125,000 qualifies you for full tuition scholarships at many top “meet-need” colleges and certainly your parents can’t afford to be full pay unless they have a LOT in assets. However, disregarding LACs means you’d need to look at Honors colleges at national universities.
Note that “meet need” doesn’t mean “what you need” but “what they think you need”, and that financial aid often includes loans.
Other universities (95% of them) do NOT meet your need.
Run the Net Price Calculator and bring results to your parents:
1° UVA, W&M, VTech, JMU or VCU or GMU - these are your instate reaches, match, and safeties. Insure those and make sure your parents can afford the “net price” spat out by the NPC.
2° beside Northwestern, run the NPC on Villanova, Northeastern, URochester, DePaul, Loyola Chicago, American, Georgetown, GWU, Rice, URichmond, Wake Forest, Vanderbilt, UVermont, UMass Amherst, USC-Columbia Honors, UMN Twin Cities Honors, U Alabama Honors.
See with your parents what is affordable based on their current income (+how much you have in your college fund or in savings dedicated to your college studies). Few universities meet need and college prices have increased in such an insane manner most parents don’t realize how much it’s changed. When we were going to college, Harvard was $15,000 and public tuition was a few hundred dollars…
I’ve thought of checking out Northwestern, for sure, but my parents have told me that the only schools worth applying to out of state are UChicago and the Ivy Leagues, because of the huge amounts of money needed for out of state schools. But, I’d definitely be interested in going if they provided financial aid, or if I win any of the large scholarships I’m applying for.
Northwestern is a highly-ranked “Ivy+” college (Ivy+ = not in the group of 8, but similarly ranked. For instance, Northwestern is ranked as high as Dartmouth and UChicago, and higher than Cornell and Brown, so it’s in the same “group”.)
You don’t need to “guess” if a university offers financial aid: they’re federally mandated to provide a tool for parents and students to know how much they’ll have to pay if they’re admitted. This tool is called “Net Price Calculator” or NPC. This way you don’t apply to colleges you cannot afford. That’s what is indicated in #2 - run the NPC on all of these colleges, bring the results to your parents, and see which ones are affordable.
With your very good stats and being located in Virginia the obvious choices are UVA and VIrginia Tech. These are great schools and probably both in the top 10 public schools in the USA but I assume that you have already thought of them.
Otherwise there are too many universities to know where to start listing them. If you can narrow down your preferences it might help people give suggestions. Given the quality of these two great public schools in Virginia I can see why your parents would be reluctant to spend more for a lower ranked school outside of Virginia. Thus you might be limited to Ivy League and equivalent (a rather high reach), and schools where you can get a very good scholarship (unless you wanted to consider schools outside of the US, where the best that you could do would probably be comparable to the Virginia schools in both quality and price).
How big is “medium sized”?
Top LACs would offer a different experience from UVA that would be worth looking into, too.
Think of Pomona, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Hamilton, Colby… ? (Lafayette, Bucknell for Engineering?) Explore their websites and see whether some would match your interests. They offer a really good undergraduate experience for many of the majors you listed.