What are my Chances for Stanford?

Agree with all of the above. You have a strong academic record. If you were a highly-desired athletic recruit, your other qualifications wouldn’t keep you out of Stanford. But without a significant hook, there is also nothing about your record that can reasonably be expected to get you in. It’s just too competitive.

Syracuse seems to have everything you want, in one place. The Newhouse School is a top journalism program. The Setnor School of Music offers a music performance minor and many ensembles. The German language offerings are sufficiently extensive for the College of Arts & Sciences to offer a BA in German Language, Literature, and Culture. There’s an equestrian club team. The Maxwell School of Public Affairs not only has an active Model UN program; it actually invented the concept back in 1927. You’d be a very strong candidate and likely get merit aid.

Bard could be another to look at. It’s top-notch for music. (All conservatory students do a five-year dual major, but you can also study music without going for the conservatory BM/BA.) It doesn’t have a journalism school per se, but it has a “written arts” program that might appeal to you. And, Bard has its own campus in Berlin, where you could study as briefly as a January intersession language intensive, or for as long as a full academic year.

These aren’t the very most competitive schools you could expect to get into - you’d be in the top quartile of entering students at both and could probably consider them low-matches if not safeties. But that’s where your college search should start - finding low-matches and safeties you could be genuinely happy to attend, because they fit what you are looking for in an academic, extracurricular, and social experience.

If you want to be in California, Scripps College could be worth a look as a realistic reach. It has a Writing and Rhetoric major, and students who are interested in journalism join the staff of The Student Life, the very high-quality joint newspaper of the Claremont Consortium. Graduates from TSL get internships and jobs every year at top-tier publications. (NYT, WSJ, etc.) The combined undergraduate population of the five colleges is about the same as Stanford’s. The German department is joint between Scripps and Pomona, and is excellent. There are solid music opportunities also, as both the Joint Music Program ensembles and the Pomona College ensembles are open to Scripps students, in addition to private instruction, theory classes, etc, based at both Scripps and Pomona. The Pomona Model UN team is open to Scripps, Pitzer, and Harvey Mudd students as well (CMC’s team is CMC-only.) Pomona itself would be a huge reach (not to say you couldn’t apply and take your shot), but Scripps would be a low reach or maybe high match… probably less than 50% odds of acceptance, but not a lot less.

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