I’m a junior in high school, and I think I might want to apply to a couple of Ivies in the future, but I don’t know which ones would be right for me. I’m going to list my stats and what’s important to me, and I want to know, first of all, if I have the chance to get into an Ivy and second of all, which Ivy would work best for me.
Stats:
Race: white
Gender: female
I live in the suburbs of Chicago, both of my parents went to college, my mom has a bachelor’s, and my dad has a master’s. (I don’t know if any of this is important.)
ACT: 36
SAT: I’m taking it in April because I’m required to by Illinois law.
GPA: I don’t know my exact weighted GPA but unweighted is a 4.0.
Freshman: 1 AP, 3 Honors, 2 Regular
Sophomore: 3 AP, 3 Honors, 2 Regular
Junior: 4 AP, 1 Honors, 3 Regular
Senior(planned): 4 AP, 1 dual enrollment college class, 2 Regular
(My regular classes have been my concert and jazz band classes and law electives.)
EC’s:
Here’s just a quick summary: I am a member of a state-ranked math team and concert/marching band, member of the mock trial team and soccer team, I do some community service(I play my instrument at church and tutor kids at school). I’m in NHS and the National Spanish Honors Society.
My main interests are math and science, and I’m interested in the legal field, but I want to get a bachelor’s in math or science before deciding if I want to go to law school. I’d prefer a school on the smaller side; big schools freak me out. I know that all the Ivies have a marching band, which I really like, because I would prefer to go to a college with a marching band. The college town (urban, rural, suburban) doesn’t really matter to me. As long as the college is in a nice place, I’m good. The field of engineering is appealing to me, so I’d like to go to a school with an engineering program just so I have the option to study engineering if I’d like to. I’d also prefer a school that has a strong focus on undergraduate education so that I know that I will have a lot of resources and attention and stuff when I attend college. I’d also prefer a school with a good focus on its fine arts program, because I plan to participate in music ensembles in college and want to have a good experience with that.
Why Ivies specifically? Do you literally mean one of the 8 members of the Ivy League, or do you also want recommendations for other elite schools? It would be a shame to rule out top LACs because those are more likely to be wholly committed to undergraduate education than larger schools are.
Start by discussing what your family can afford. Run the NPC at some of the schools, and use UIUC as a benchmark for engineering and costs. It’s also a matter of what school is a good value because the top engineering schools are a mix of public and private.
Fortunately you can start with a ranking list of engineering schools. You will have heard of most of them. Engineering requires a lot of resources and the schools tend to be a bit larger. Some of the top smaller ones are Princeton, MIT, Harvey Mudd, Northwestern, Cornell, Rice, Carnegie Mellon, and Caltech.
Ever considered UChicago there in your home state? The president of Princeton’s son attends UChicago presently. UChicago is excellent in your major(s) of interest, is very academic and scholarly, and has a GREAT history of free and open discussion (which was the original intent of the college experience). The Ivies have been criticized lately for a lack of that- and rightly so. You should be able to debate and bring up controversial subjects without being shouted down- liberal or conservative. Can’t say the Ivies are tolerant of differing opinions anymore. But UChicago is very tolerant of all opinions without fear of repercussion. It’s something to think about when deciding where to spend the next 4 years of your life. Anyway, if you have a GPA to match, you will be very competitive at any school you apply to with a 36.
Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown and Cornell have the highest % of undergraduates among the Ivies – all around 70% – which can be used as a proxy for the level of undergraduate focus among peers.
Of those, Princeton, Cornell and Brown appear to offer fairly comprehensive Engineering options.
Dartmouth offers a BE, but I could not tell from their web site if they offer concentrations in traditional tracks like Mechanical, Electrical, Civil, etc.
@cheesepopcorn I am not sure that you are describing an Ivy League school in your post. @TooOld4School has some good suggestions most of which are not strictly speaking Ivy League schools, but some such as MIT and Caltech and Stanford are mostly stronger than the Ivy League schools for CS and engineering (Harvard is very good at Math, as are MIT and Stanford, although all are a reach as are most of the schools being discussed on this thread). Getting a school that is top ranked for Engineering as well as for Fine Arts might be a challenge, although the music program sometimes is very good at schools which are not all that strong on other aspects of fine arts.
You also need to find out what your budget is and run the NPC on all of the schools that you are seriously considering. Budget issues restrict school choice for the large majority of students.
You should at least take a close look at in-state options such as UIUC.
I also think that you should visit some large schools and some small schools, and see where you feel most comfortable. I would start near where you live just to minimize the travel time for your first few university visits.
Other (non-Ivy) highly selective private schools, over 60% undergrad, with fairly comprehensive Engineering offerings – Ivy equivalents:
Notre Dame
*Rice (only 57% undergrad, but known for Engineering)
*Vanderbilt (also about 57% undergrad)
There aren’t many highly selective private universities with more undergrads than grad students. Maybe 60% is too high of a bar. Anyway, those are six legit schools with legit Engineering offerings that are 57+% undergrad. Seven if you check out Dartmouth and deem its Engineering offerings adequate.
A handful of LACs offer engineering too, and they are almost completely undergrad-focused (some offer some grad programs…).
The other Ivies have “scramble” or “scatter” bands, which have significantly lower expectations in terms of musical or marching ability. They rely more on humor (often tasteless) to provide audience entertainment. Just to be clear, for example, the name of the “Yale Precision Marching Band” is meant as a joke. The scramble bands are much less organized, and have much lower practice commitments, than traditional marching bands. High schools don’t typically have scramble bands; read here if you are unfamiliar with the concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_band
Most of the “real” marching bands in the northeast are at schools with big-time college football (e.g. Penn State, Syracuse, Boston College). For the most part, the top private universities and liberal arts colleges in the northeast don’t expect either their football teams or their bands to perform at that kind of level. To my knowledge, the principal exceptions are Cornell, the Lehigh Marching 97, and the Holy Cross Goodtime Marching Band.
Enrolling in engineering is a bigger commitment than most other undergraduate majors. An ABET-accredited engineering program has extensive coursework requirements for math and science, as well as engineering. If you want to finish in four years, you typically have to commit to the engineering track as a freshman. Note also that this track may not leave a lot of room for non-STEM electives.
So people who think they might be interested in engineering, but aren’t sure, are usually advised to start out as engineering majors. If you start in engineering and change your mind, you can always transfer out (engineering programs commonly have high attrition). But if you don’t start in engineering and change your mind, you may not have the option of transferring in later, because it will be too late to make up the lost coursework (unless you are prepared to study for five years, rather than four).
You seem like a person with diverse interests, and you want a strong undergraduate focus. People like that are commonly attracted to the elite liberal arts colleges (which are exclusively devoted to delivering broad, high-quality undergraduate education). But with few exceptions (see post 8 above), the LACs don’t try to offer engineering. It’s very tough to combine the breadth expected of a traditional liberal arts education with the depth expected of a traditional engineering program, unless you take more than four years. The LACs commonly offer computer science, which is relatively easy to integrate into a liberal arts curriculum, but not engineering.
I was going to say the same thing as @Corbett. My husband and I marched in a traditional high-stepping marching band in high school (modeled after high-stepping bands at historically black colleges and universities, like Florida A&M’s - aka, it was literally the band featured in Drumline). He was then the drum major of Columbia’s marching band when he was there (just a few years ago, ad a non-traditional student). They are VERY different experiences. They don’t even really march, and the practices and musical quality are taken a lot less seriously, and as Corbett mentioned, they also often cause controversy with their jokes and stunts.
That aside, though, any of the Ivies could probably fit your desires, except perhaps Cornell, which is pretty big (but ironically has the most serious marching band). UPenn is also pretty big, although it has fewer undergrads than Cornell. Dartmouth, Princeton, and Brown are the smaller of the Ivies and also have proportionately more undergrads than some of the other Ivies. Princeton and Brown, especially, are said to have a stronger undergraduate focus. Brown’s open curriculum may make it possible for you to study a lot of your interests.
In addition to the liberal arts colleges listed above (Swarthmore, Lafayette, Bucknell, and Harvey Mudd), Smith College also offers engineering. It’s a women’s college. If you are just more generally interested in math or a science field, your options open up considerably.
Engineering is a team profession, so as you explore, I would pay particular attention to student projects and academic support that the school will give you. Look for an attitude where the schools want you to succeed. Some of the student projects are pretty incredible, like the solar car student teams, many of which have multi-million dollar budgets.
For top-tier universities top-tier music and a “real” marching band, look at Northwestern/Bienen, USC/Thornton, and Vanderbilt/Blair. For elite academics and music but a lower-key pep band on the marching side of things, look at URochester/Eastman and Hopkins/Peabody. Rice has a great music conservatory, but it’s quite separate from the rest of the school - not as many music opportunities for non-majors as many other places. Excellent STEM at all of the above. Ivy-wise, Yale has the strongest music program, but as others have noted, you won’t find a “real” marching band program at any Ivy except maybe Cornell. As a rule, most schools that have decent marching bands tend to be on the large side - there’s a “critical mass” factor there. It seems to me that Vanderbilt might hit the sweet spot for you, as far as being smaller but still having excellent engineering/science, a serious music conservatory, and marching band. Vandy manages to field a “real” marching band program, despite its size, by drawing students from other area colleges and universities as well: https://www.vanderbilt.edu/vuband/