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I've never negotiated with a school before so I'd appreciate any and all help that I could get.

Here's where I stand right now:

UCLA: 80K
USC: 150K
Vanderbilt:125k
Berkeley: No financial aid offer yet

I'm still waiting to hear back from a number of T14 schools (Virginia, Michigan, Penn, Cornell, Northwestern, Chicago, and Stanford) as well as Texas.

For negotiating with UCLA, should I wait to see if Berkeley makes me an offer or is the acceptance enough (along with the Vandy and USC offer) to leverage a better offer? Additionally, should I go back to USC and try to leverage more $ with the UCLA/Vandy offers and Berkeley acceptance? What's my best route for maximizing my leverage and when should I email UCLA and USC?

Well you should at least start by showing UCLA your USC offer. You can then take the UCLA offer back to USC and see if they nudge you even higher. In terms of Berkeley, I don't know for sure if they will even negotiate outside of their matching program, but it doesn't hurt to ask, right?

You've still got a lot of schools to hear from yet. I'd start with UCLA and USC and hopefully that will be enough to keep your attention until you hear from everywhere else.

Berkeley won't match, they're very strict about whose offers they'll consider. Objectively speaking, waiting is best at this point, but who's your #1? If it's USC, while I'm not sure how much else you could get out of them, that April 1 acceptance deadline is coming up fast - I'd go to UCLA now, and if they offer anything $105k or greater take that back to USC.

EDIT: You could also take those offers to Vanderbilt at the same time you go to UCLA, try to speed up their decision.

Would anyone be interested in reading my negotiation letter?

wryguy wrote:Would anyone be interested in reading my negotiation letter?

Sure. Send it my way.