Schools similar to MIT (but less impossible)
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Anonymous
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These are the 40 schools with 5 star academics per College Transitions (from their book, Colleges Worth Your Money, 2023 ed):
Amherst Barnard Bowdoin Brown Caltech Carleton Carnegie Mellon Claremont McKenna Columbia Cornell Dartmouth Davidson Duke Emory Olin Hamilton Harvard Harvey Mudd Haverford Johns Hopkins MIT Middlebury Northwestern Pomona Princeton Rice Stanford Swarthmore US Naval Academy Vanderbilt UCLA UChicago U of Notre Dame UPenn U of Virginia Washington & Lee WashU Wellesley Williams Yale |
Anonymous
lol nice source "College Transitions" They left some pretty big players out. I'd stick with this. https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/engineering-doctorate?_sort=rank&_sortDirection=asc |
Anonymous
The OP's daughter has not expressed an interest in engineering. |
Anonymous
I thought OP stated STEM was the interest of study? |
Anonymous
STEM is very broad. There were follow-up questions already. From 4/28:
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Anonymous
Subsequently the OP said that her daughter has not mentioned engineering as an area of potential interest. |
Anonymous
From what I've found, it seems Rowman & Littlefield published the College Transitions book. Overall, the book appears to have offered a form of opinion that the authors were reasonably qualified to express. In any case, I credit the DCUM contributor with explicitly citing a source, including the year of the edition used for the content of the post. |
Anonymous
Sorry for the confusion. Yes, "STEM" is probably too broad. Her top 3 interests right now are chemistry (theoretical), physics, and math. But I would love it if this kid settled on something practical like cs or engineering. |
Anonymous
Even if your daughter maintains an interest in, say, theoretical chemistry, an interdisciplinary approach to her education could introduce her to more practical fields. For example, data science (available as a major at many schools) combines statistics and computing with a chosen applied domain, such as theoretical chemistry. |
Anonymous
This is the worst major choice for OP's daughter. Stay away from these experimental, predatory programs. Even a chemistry major at Pomona will launch her much further than this foolishness. |
Anonymous
In my opinion, as someone who filtered out of STEM without ever actually getting a grade below a C plus: If a student isn’t creating the list of safeties herself, encouraging her going to a super selective science program is a bad idea. She should be thinking of a place like WPI, Kalamazoo, Juniata or Lewis & Clark as her dream school, not a place on the various Top 20 and Top 40 lists people are posting, and not any state’s flagship. Even if she takes the SATs again and does better, she should look at the Niche.com scattergrams and find private schools, that will appreciate her money and have a strong incentive to keep her, where a 1520 is clearly in the top 10 percent, not even schools where she’d be in the top quarter. The problem is that she’s going to need nurturing, not a place focused on weeding her out. People here laugh at schools like Boston University and Wash. U., but I don’t think the people laughing have taken a physics course for majors at those schools. It’s not easy staying in a STEM major in a school like that. I think the bare minimum for succeeding in STEM there is that the students had an encyclopedic knowledge of the college admissions process when they were high school sophomores. If you try to take kids who aren’t that independent, obsessive and precocious and boost them up into a Case Western, maybe they’ll get in, but they’ll be the seat warmers. They may get less faculty love and learn less than if they’d gone to a mellower school. So the goal should be looking for schools with STEM professors that are a little beneath her, not schools that wow DCUM people. |
Anonymous
Note that the OP reported that this student reached a perfect score of 1520 on the PSAT and has yet to take the SAT. |
Anonymous
UChicago is very strong in all three. They even have a "molecular engineering" program which combines the two and is somewhat oractical. Also, physical chemistry is a theoretical field that best combines the three. TMP chemistry is a good YouTube channel for that material. |
Anonymous
| Also, EDing to UChicago makes it a realistic option. Especially ED 0. |