Hello! I’m becoming a senior this year and need some help looking for schools, preferably LACs.
A little about me:
Female Asian
GPA: 4.0-4.5 weighted
SAT: 2170; Math II (800), Chem (780)
ACT: 33 (34 superscore)
AP: Chem (4), Stat (5), Cal AB (4), WH (4), going to take 3 more senior year
I’m planning to be a biology major, veterinarian medicine.
I live outside the US, don’t have US citizenship but do have permanent residency.
I am planning to apply for financial aid.
What I’m looking for:
small to medium size school
strong in the science areas
don’t have a preference in location
I am already looking at UC Davis (it’s a big school, but strong in animal sciences), Colby, Bowdoin, and a few others. Preferably LACs, but universities are okay too if they provide financial aid.
Any help would be great, thank you!
Contact the liberal arts colleges in the top 25 and ask for data on how many students go to vet school, where they go and what the acceptance rate has been over the past few years.
You are very clever to look at lacs because biology is generally a popular major and these schools don’t get many applications from Asian students.
What you want is a high acceptance rate to vet school and a small number of applicants so you aren’t competing with your classmates.
I don’t think many schools will give an exact acceptance rate for vet school. We tried to get that type of information for med school a few years ago from various schools and many were purposefully vague.
I would also warn you to be very wary if you do get any vet /med etc. school acceptance rate information. When researching for my D we found that some colleges only support applications from their very high level students and only count those students whose applications they supported in their acceptance rates (making their acceptance rates extremely high – one school touted 100% acceptance) – other schools support all of their students applications into med/vet/dental schools so these schools would have lower acceptance rates (since some students with a lower chance of acceptance are in their pool) but ultimately these schools may get more kids into med/vet etc .schools because more people do apply. So, if you do get any statistics be sure you understand exactly what it means.
In addition many students drop from the pre-med track after a year or two so the percentage of people starting pre med/vet to the percentage of people actually completing the requirements and applying to med/vet etc. schools would be telling number as well (again, this percentage would be difficult if not impossible to get from many schools).
And be aware that many (not all) vet students end up working for a few years (often with large animals) before being accepted into vet school. It is not always a straightforward path so be prepared. Any I believe US vet schools give preference to state residents so you would need to research the possibilities of being accepted into a US vet school as an international if that is your plan (I don’t know the answer).
If you need merit aid, consider schools where your stats place you in the top 25% or so of students. The USNWR list of LACs (available online) is a good place to start – I’m not a particular fan of rankings but it is a good list of LACs and has some basic stats. It can be hard to get merit aid as an international student. Some LACs my D who is in the sciences liked included Lafayette, Union & Franklin & Marshall. Some mid-sized options offhand might be URochester and Lehigh. But there are a ton of fine schools out there.
You should reconsider the UC Davis application. The cost is >$55K/year and likely all you’d get is a $5.5.K loan. Go run the Net Price Calculator on the web site of each of your schools.
You may want to investigate some of the schools identified on this website: http://www.ctcl.org/colleges/map. Some of the schools listed here are strong in science: College of Wooster, Rhodes College, and Whitman College come to mind, but I am sure that a number of the others mentioned also fall into that category.
Tufts is just outside Boston, has about 5,200 undergrads and has an early admit program at their veterinary school, Cummings. Cummings also early admits students from WPI, UVM and UMass Amherst.
“I live outside the US, don’t have US citizenship but do have permanent residency.”
The Net Price Calculators should work reasonably well for you because you are a legal permanent resident. At least one of your parents must be filing US federal income tax and you should have the necessary paperwork relatively handy.
Your stats are good, but you haven’t indicated how much it is that your family can afford. So sort that out with them. That way you will know how deep you are going to have to dig to find affordable options.
Your stats will get you in and in some cases the money will also definitely be there. You just have to think about how negotiable the rest of your wish list is.
Does your US permanent resident or citizen parent have in-state residence right now? Or is that parent outside the country with you? If there is a state of residence, find out whether that state has a Vet school of its own, and if not, which Vet schools treat those students as in-state at admissions time. There are formal agreements about this between the various states.
Take a look at Delaware Valley College. http://www.delval.edu/ It is an LAC-type college with excellent Ag and pre-Vet programs. I don’t know about the financial aid situation there, so you will have to investigate a bit.