My College Choices/Your Opinion

[RickyJ]

Throwing your money away on an ivy league school is a very bad idea. A degree is merely a piece of paper, credentials to get a job. Education is a life long process that occurs out of school much more than in school. Self-education is easy to do today with 24/7 access to the Internet. I wish the Internet was this big when I was 16. Don't be in such a big hurry to finish school. Relax and enjoy your youth, it doesn't last long.

 

[torchbearer]

Do you speak from experience, or are you making this up off the top of your head?

(I think I know the answer)

My political science teachers were pushing snake oil in their classes. I was the thorn in their side, and they let me know everytime they had an opportunity to subjectively grade a written essay or report.

 

[torchbearer]

Throwing your money away on an ivy league school is a very bad idea. A degree is merely a piece of paper, credentials to get a job. Education is a life long process that occurs out of school much more than in school. Self-education is easy to do today with 24/7 access to the Internet. I wish the Internet was this big when I was 16. Don't be in such a big hurry to finish school. Relax and enjoy your youth, it doesn't last long.

the benefit of going Ivy League is the friends you make will most likely have a mommy or daddy who is big time in a huge corp or something.
We study this in sociology. the term slips my mind, but it has to do with proximity.
You are more likely to get hooked up with huge opportunities if you surround yourself with the children of the elite.
That is the purpose of going to these schools.
You can get the book knowledge anywhere... but the friends you make are determined by where you go.

 

[AFM]

Check out Johns Hopkins.

 

[AisA1787]

If you go to an Ivy league school... you're paying for the reputation, not the quality of education.

You can do a masters and have a PHD in economics... worth $-00,000's of dollars... and I know more about whats happening in this world, causality etc - obtained from the entire media section at mises.org for FREE..

Yeaaah sucks to be a fool... but what sucks worse is paying hundred of thousands of dollars to be a fool

If you choose to go into politics - it's my opinion, you'll be wasting your life. It would really seem like a loss to humanity if you did imo..

Ron Paul didn't start out in politics - so don't you do it either... he became a DR.. and did austrian economics on the side...

My suggestion you follow what you love; just not politics.. any clown and his 3 monkeys can run eventually... I say go get a Nobel Peace Prize or whatever they call it these days a Laurette and remain the only non retarded academic out there..

Maths / science / numbers / physics - are a damn lot harder to politicize... so stick to those areas if you want to pay for the reputation...

If you do politics - I may just have to hunt you down and kill you...

I'm an Ivy League alum, and I wholeheartedly agree with this advice. While I had an amazing time in school, unless you can go for free or nearly free (i.e., less than or equal to state school tuition) it's simply not worth it. Through some special circumstances, I have very little debt from tuition... but if I did, I would be kicking myself in the ass right now.

I'm currently in a PhD program at a public university (materials science and engineering), and from my experience here I can offer some advice.... if you are as smart as you say you are, you can go to a public university and rock the place - get a 4.0, amazing recommendations for grad school, all while having a life. For real. I do so much LESS work in grad school than I ever did as an undergrad. And the undergrads here do even less than me. If you have average or better social skills and interact with enough professors to get several recommendations for grad, law, or med school, you will be golden.

After all, it's your graduate degree (and dissertation research, if you go that route) that people pay attention to when hiring you for faculty positions or whatever you decide to do. And if you're going into physics, you will need a PhD. Period. End of story. Or else you will not be working in physics. Grad school, and especially your adviser and his or her connections, is all that will matter for you.

Final summary: get your undergrad degree as inexpensively as possible, go to an amazing grad school (where you will most likely have a fellowship, free tuition, and a living stipend), and get a great job.

If you're looking really far ahead, you should read this book. It will show you that even your grad school degree "is not enough" to land the job you want after grad school, if you're in the hard sciences:

A PhD Is Not Enough: A Guide To Survival In Science
by Peter J. Feibelman

p.s. all of those solicitations you're getting from top universities are mainly a way of boosting their application numbers so they can reject more people, thus making themselves more "selective" and improving their ranking in U.S. News... It's true that they only send them to qualified students, but there are many more qualified students in the U.S. than there are seats in Ivy League schools...

 

[AisA1787]

the benefit of going Ivy League is the friends you make will most likely have a mommy or daddy who is big time in a huge corp or something.
We study this in sociology. the term slips my mind, but it has to do with proximity.
You are more likely to get hooked up with huge opportunities if you surround yourself with the children of the elite.
That is the purpose of going to these schools.
You can get the book knowledge anywhere... but the friends you make are determined by where you go.

Yes, true.... but really only if you don't plan on going to grad school. Then your undergrad days will be where you make your connections and the most prestigious schools will give you a better opportunity (although far from guaranteed) to meet the "right" people.

If you plan on going to grad school, your connections from undergrad will be much less important, basically not important at all, as far as your career is concerned (some exceptions of course are possible..).

 

[AisA1787]

I have never wanted to go to a state school. Never appealed to me. I can't see myself going to Duke, no offense to any alumni, but I feel I deserve a lot more than that. The least I can get is Ivy League. I really don't care about the cost. Tuition for Cornell and Harvard both run about $50,120. I currently fall under the $0 income category. I eat, breathe, and shit school. It's all I have and frankly I won't settle for less.

I would strongly recommend opening your mind up to more possibilities or you will miss out on finding the right school for you. If you don't like the atmosphere of Duke, or if you hate pine trees, or can't stand their obsession with basketball, those are all good (or at least understandable) reasons to not go there. If you simply think it's not prestigious or "good enough" for you, then you are missing the whole point.

Out of all of the professors in my program, I have no idea where any of them (except my adviser) went to college. Because it doesn't matter. I know they went to places like MIT, Cal Tech, Stanford, and so on, for graduate school. But college? Simply does not matter if you go to grad school. And -- if you look at where MIT, Cal Tech, and Stanford get their grad students, they get quite a few from state schools -- schools that, at this point in your development, you think aren't good enough for you.

Find out what you want to do. Is it physics? If so, find out which universities have the most well known physics professors (Nobel laureates write impressive grad school recommendations...) and the best opportunities for undergraduate research, which will bolster your credentials for grad school.

And don't write off schools -- especially Duke (sweet jebus! that's a good school...) -- because you think they're below you. Also, just curious -- if the "least" you can get is Ivy League, what's the most you can get?

I can tell you from experience that the only difference between the Ivy League and a great public university is the size of your tuition bill and the arrogance of the student body.

(disclaimer: obviously not all of the students at my undergrad institution were unbearably arrogant, but it was a much larger percentage than at my current university...)

 

[torchbearer]

Yes, true.... but really only if you don't plan on going to grad school. Then your undergrad days will be where you make your connections and the most prestigious schools will give you a better opportunity (although far from guaranteed) to meet the "right" people.

If you plan on going to grad school, your connections from undergrad will be much less important, basically not important at all, as far as your career is concerned (some exceptions of course are possible..).

the point still applies. you will have to go to the ivy league school at some point.
undergrad or grad. makes no difference.

 

[AisA1787]

the point still applies. you will have to go to the ivy league school at some point.
undergrad or grad. makes no difference.

I don't want to get into an argument... but my guess is you have no idea what you're talking about. Did you go to an Ivy League school for any of your degrees? If not, then why are you giving out advice as if you did?

I got an undergrad degree and master's degree from Ivy League schools. I'm not saying that makes me special. My entire point is that it does not make me special. If more people realized this, we wouldn't have parents and kids going hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt for an education they could have gotten 10 times cheaper at their state university. It does, however, make me qualified to speak from experience on this issue.

Graduate school in the hard sciences in the Ivy League is very different than the undergraduate scene. There are not very many of the "privileged elite" in grad school in the Ivy League. There are mostly just regular science nerds, same as you will find at any other grad school.

In fact, I would venture to guess that most people (not you torchbearer, as I'm sure you know better) who talk about the "Ivy League" couldn't list the member schools. People want to go to an Ivy League school before they even figure out what they want to study. And that goes for high school students as well as college grads looking for grad school. The majority don't even know who will be teaching them, much less what they will be learning. But it doesn't matter because it's... drum roll... The Ivy League!

For all of the bitching and moaning that goes on in this forum about how the MSM brainwashes people, there certainly is a lot of love in this thread for myths about the "Ivy League" which are simply the result of relentless brand promotion by the Ivy League schools themselves and have very little to do with the quality of the education students receive there. Not that it's not a great education, because it is, but you can get just as good an education from any number of other public or private universities in this country. For a lot less money.

And that's about all I have to say about that. To the OP, good luck. And keep an open mind.

 

[torchbearer]

I don't want to get into an argument... but my guess is you have no idea what you're talking about. Did you go to an Ivy League school for any of your degrees? If not, then why are you giving out advice as if you did?

I got an undergrad degree and master's degree from Ivy League schools. I'm not saying that makes me special. My entire point is that it does not make me special. If more people realized this, we wouldn't have parents and kids going hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt for an education they could have gotten 10 times cheaper at their state university. It does, however, make me qualified to speak from experience on this issue.

Graduate school in the hard sciences in the Ivy League is very different than the undergraduate scene. There are not very many of the "privileged elite" in grad school in the Ivy League. There are mostly just regular science nerds, same as you will find at any other grad school.

In fact, I would venture to guess that most people (not you torchbearer, as I'm sure you know better) who talk about the "Ivy League" couldn't list the member schools. People want to go to an Ivy League school before they even figure out what they want to study. They don't even know who will be teaching them, much less what they will be learning. But it doesn't matter because it's... drum roll... The Ivy League!

For all of the bitching and moaning that goes on in this forum about how the MSM brainwashes people, there certainly is a lot of love in this thread for myths about the "Ivy League" which are simply the result of relentless brand promotion by the Ivy League schools themselves and have very little to do with the quality of the education students receive there. Not that it's not a great education, because it is, but you can get just as good an education from any number of other public or private universities in this country. For a lot less money.

And that's about all I have to say about that. To the OP, good luck. And keep an open mind.

It is not the school but who encompasses its population.
ULM in Lafayette will have fewer people of privilege attending it as would harvard or yale.
or you denying this fact? or did i not communicate this idea effectively in my prior post?
If this is wrong, so are all the sociological textbooks on this subject.

People like George Bush and John Kerry didn't graduate from junior college.

 

[Nirvikalpa]

Most of my professors teach/have taught at an Ivy League school, and they all tell me the quality of the material is nothing better than what you can get at a public university. Many of the students (and this is a science teacher that told me this) at the undergrad level sleep during the classes and really don't care for the education. They were a shoe-in because they knew an alumni.

As someone earlier had stated - you are paying for the reputation, not the education.

If you are going for the sciences, I highly recommend a small school. There, you can get the hands-on experience you need to truly be successful. I go to a private college in PA that has less than 2,000 students - it gives me the opportunity to stand out and really be of value to my school.

Also. This is from my own experiences as a Science major. My college automatically wants me to take no less than 3 courses in Calc (Calc 3 and beyond) - and this is at a small, no-one-has-heard-of-it college in the middle of nowhere. I checked on UPenn's veterinarian site, and they said only ONE YEAR of Calc is acceptable and needed to apply for a masters.

I want to also stress that a lot of experimentation is not accessible to undergrads - only to graduate and doctoral students. If you go to an ivy league school, chances are the only hands on you will receive in the sciences would be labs, which are basic in any college.

Grad school however, if planning to go on to grad school... that is where name recognition really matters.

I feel I deserve a lot more than that. The least I can get is Ivy League. I really don't care about the cost. Tuition for Cornell and Harvard both run about $50,120. I currently fall under the $0 income category. I eat, breathe, and shit school. It's all I have and frankly I won't settle for less.

Work for it; no one ever deserves anything. Right now there's a kid in your predicament with a 5.00GPA, and they think they deserve it a lot more than you. Remember that. You're not, and never going to be, a gift to any college. There's always someone out there better than you.

Seen a lot of students at my college have an attitude like that, and they were quite disappointed with themselves come first semester grades.

 

[yongrel]

Work for it; no one ever deserves anything. Right now there's a kid in your predicament with a 5.00GPA, and they think they deserve it a lot more than you. Remember that. You're not, and never going to be, a gift to any college. There's always someone out there better than you.

Seen a lot of students at my college have an attitude like that, and they were quite disappointed with themselves come first semester grades.

Here here!

 

[0zzy]

Don't take political science, you seem to have an interest in an actual skill. If you want to study politics study it yourself, you'll learn how you want when you want what you want. Hell, take their syllabus and learn urself u want.

 

[ThisCharmingAzn]

I'm a physics major at UNH studying string theory, and I've learned quite a bit about this whole applying to college process. There's a key point of advice that you should take, which is that your undergraduate school doesn't really matter that much. I mean, of course you shouldn't set the bar at a community college, but going to Harvard or Cornell, while they're great schools with great programs, isn't a neccesity. If you get in and want to go, then great. But there might be other options that are cheaper, and the education you'll get is quite the same. When you go to graduate school, which I'm assuming you will, that's where you want the big name. Plus there's a big cost issue associated with this. MIT is my first choice for grad school, and I think undergrad tuition is like 50k now? I don't think it's much different for anywhere else. Other physics schools you may want to look up are Caltech and Stanford. Richard Feynman was from Caltech, I believe. MIT from what I've heard is not a good place for undergraduate, I hear it's more like a factory, pump em in, pump em out, you know? But they treat the grad kids like gold. But see if you can find a school in state with a good physics program first.

As for politics, I'm not so sure I can help as much, but the whole don't worry about getting into a big name school thing I'm sure applies here as well. By the way, it's pretty cool to meet another Ron-Paul revolutionary/string theorist haha. Hope that helps.

 

[SnappleLlama]

Well, I guess the first question is: where do you want to live? There are plenty of non-Ivy science schools out there...RIT, Drexel, etc. If you're going into the sciences, why not check out a tech-heavy school?

 

[amy31416]

I'm a physics major at UNH studying string theory, and I've learned quite a bit about this whole applying to college process. There's a key point of advice that you should take, which is that your undergraduate school doesn't really matter that much. I mean, of course you shouldn't set the bar at a community college, but going to Harvard or Cornell, while they're great schools with great programs, isn't a neccesity. If you get in and want to go, then great. But there might be other options that are cheaper, and the education you'll get is quite the same. When you go to graduate school, which I'm assuming you will, that's where you want the big name. Plus there's a big cost issue associated with this. MIT is my first choice for grad school, and I think undergrad tuition is like 50k now? I don't think it's much different for anywhere else. Other physics schools you may want to look up are Caltech and Stanford. Richard Feynman was from Caltech, I believe. MIT from what I've heard is not a good place for undergraduate, I hear it's more like a factory, pump em in, pump em out, you know? But they treat the grad kids like gold. But see if you can find a school in state with a good physics program first.

As for politics, I'm not so sure I can help as much, but the whole don't worry about getting into a big name school thing I'm sure applies here as well. By the way, it's pretty cool to meet another Ron-Paul revolutionary/string theorist haha. Hope that helps.

Oh, that reminds me of another suggestion for the sciences: Carnegie Mellon University--they are doing some pretty incredible stuff there in the sciences. It's more robotics/engineering than physics, but a great school. I think you're probably right about MIT for undergrad.

I went to a no-name school for undergrad, graduated magna cum laude, was able to do doctoral level research in undergrad, and got into Hopkins for grad school. They don't really care what school you went to, as long as you distinguished yourself in some way(s).

 

[SnappleLlama]

Oh, that reminds me of another suggestion for the sciences: Carnegie Mellon University--they are doing some pretty incredible stuff there in the sciences. It's more robotics/engineering than physics, but a great school. I think you're probably right about MIT for undergrad.

I went to a no-name school for undergrad, graduated magna cum laude, was able to do doctoral level research in undergrad, and got into Hopkins for grad school. They don't really care what school you went to, as long as you distinguished yourself in some way(s).

Gotta agree about Carnegie Mellon, even though I'm a Pitt grad

That part about Hopkins? Damn...you must be seriously intelligent. Hopkins is no joke.

 

[ThisCharmingAzn]

Oh, that reminds me of another suggestion for the sciences: Carnegie Mellon University--they are doing some pretty incredible stuff there in the sciences. It's more robotics/engineering than physics, but a great school. I think you're probably right about MIT for undergrad.

I went to a no-name school for undergrad, graduated magna cum laude, was able to do doctoral level research in undergrad, and got into Hopkins for grad school. They don't really care what school you went to, as long as you distinguished yourself in some way(s).

I've been talking to a lot of people and they all seem to tell me the say thing. Getting into grad school is more about your reputation - your research, your recommendations, and who you know - rather than your grades and community service and laundry list of activities that you go through to get into undergrad. Grads schools want to see a student who can do research, work on their own, independently, produce quality results, be responsible, perhaps have already been published. Because the truth is that schools look at you, the student, as a product. They want to know what you can do for them. What will you do if they invest in you? (The funny part is that you actually pay them haha). Yea grades and that laundry list are still sort of important, but that's not the tipping point. At least, that's what I've heard. Would you agree? So as an undergrad I'm gonna push hard to get research in my hands, meet professors from other schools, and do a lot of extra work.

 

[amy31416]

I've been talking to a lot of people and they all seem to tell me the say thing. Getting into grad school is more about your reputation - your research, your recommendations, and who you know - rather than your grades and community service and laundry list of activities that you go through to get into undergrad. Grads schools want to see a student who can do research, work on their own, independently, produce quality results, be responsible, perhaps have already been published. Because the truth is that schools look at you, the student, as a product. They want to know what you can do for them. What will you do if they invest in you? (The funny part is that you actually pay them haha). Yea grades and that laundry list are still sort of important, but that's not the tipping point. At least, that's what I've heard. Would you agree? So as an undergrad I'm gonna push hard to get research in my hands, meet professors from other schools, and do a lot of extra work.

You're absolutely right, but I'm only speaking for the sciences here. There are also scenarios where they pay you to go to grad school. I didn't go straight to grad school after undergrad, so I lost that possibility. Independent research is vital, they don't want to have to babysit or hold your hand too much. Most professors are a study in egotism, so be prepared for that, it can be obnoxious.

For example, in undergrad, I had a scholarship to do research with a person getting their PhD in biochemistry for two semesters. I did independent environmental research that I picked up by volunteering to continue something that wasn't finished. I'd also written grant proposals, filled out all the forms begging for more equipment/reagents, written "easy-use" guides for the analytical instruments along with troubleshooting guides (since most were poor translations from Japanese/German.) I also learned the fine art of begging other departments for time on their equipment (great on an application if you are one of those who can work well with others--good relationship skills are lacking in the sciences.) Schmoozing comes in handy, negotation skills are very good to have.

Just speaking from my own observations, your mileage may vary. Expect to have to do things like go into the lab at 3AM or at random times. With biochem, often the timing worked out that way. I preferred it because I didn't have to deal with other people getting in my way or interrupting me.

 

[tribute_13]

If I go to school one more semester after high school, I'll have my associates because Ill only be two credits shy. Once I finish this, I'll be an undergrad?