Reply to Schools similar to MIT (but less impossible)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Looking for a school for a student who particularly excels at STEM but also wants a strong academic experience all around. Loves learning, loves a challenge, and possibly wants to go to grad school for academic research so undergrad research opportunities are important. She would love to be around other students who are enthusiastic and passionate about science. So far she has all A's, 1520 PSAT, will be maxed out on math/science courses at her school. Very involved in music oriented extracurriculars and would want to continue these in college for fun. If she could pick the school of her dreams, it would be MIT for sure, but she not have national/international level recognition or research experience. I am hoping to steer her towards schools with a similar "spirit" but which are less selective and more achievable. Any suggestions for schools to focus our search? We will likely be full pay. I think the school community and academic strength would be top priority for her rather than the setting of the school. [/quote]

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.

[b]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.[/b]

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. [/quote]
Note that the OP reported that this student reached a perfect score of 1520 on the PSAT and has yet to take the SAT.
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