What universities in the UK are americans familiar with in general? (except oxbridge obviousley). Since I have to leave my GPA blank, should I write something about the UK degree classification system to explain, (since in the UK first class (top 11% ish) is about 70% but of course in the US system that would be viewed as fairly low) or do you think it will be fine?
I'm trying to work out where to apply to now. My criteria are that I want to be in California/New York/Vancouver (Maybe Florida) in that order of preference I guess, mainly because seems like most of the best schools are in New York/California anyway, but also for the experience/lifestyle etc, being from cloudy england and all. So that has led me to consider:
Caltech,
Stanford,
Berkeley,
UCSB
as my top 4. So I have the "dream schools" portion of my list done, but I'm having real problems with the rest of it. I'm not sure if I should be putting schools like UC Davis as safeties, since even though they have lower rep, they are still state schools, which may be v diff for internationals to get funding too (I keep hearing that the UC's are v bad for an international to get funding from in general). So that kind of puts UCLA,UCSD, NYU? into question......then the other places I can think of are like Columbia, Cornell etc but theyre hardly safe choices.
Oh....I'm applying for string theory btw.....perhaps again making it more difficult for me
they don't really depend on the state or gov't to fund them that much so they usually accept more international students than public school. Because of that you are more likely to get accepted in private school than a public if they both have the same rank otherwise...but you already knew that... so just pick some private schools. 
