<p>Too many schools do a 3-2 with Columbia to have that a significant recommendation.</p>
<p>In terms of LAC’s Williams has stellar opportunities for kids as accomplished as the OP’s kid. However, there are distribution requirements and students are expected to master other subjects as well.</p>
<p>The math faculty and students are quite impressive.</p>
<p>Very nice post, Consolation! I’ve tried many times to express those points as clearly and succinctly as you did, and I’ve never done it so well.</p>
<p>And I also concur with Pizzagirl. :)</p>
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<p>Williams’ math offerings are here:
[Williams</a> College Catalog](<a href=“http://catalog.williams.edu/catalog.php?&offered=Y&subj=MATH]Williams”>http://catalog.williams.edu/catalog.php?&offered=Y&subj=MATH)</p>
<p>Since the student in question is taking (presumably university sophomore level) math as a high school junior, it is likely that he will exhaust Williams’ math offerings too early. A school with a strong graduate program in math is likely needed to satisfy the student’s math interests. Strong programs in related subjects would also be highly desirable.</p>
<p>Consolation,
“Quote:
I suggest to cool down - this is UG that you consider. It is truly does not matter.<br>
It truly DOES matter.
It determines who you will spend the next four years of your life with, who you will share ideas with, who you will explore adult life and grow up with, most likely who will be your longest term friends.”</p>
<p>-Completely disagree. Place does NOT assure future success. Place does NOT choose your close friends. Hard working ethic will assure future success. Personal preferences will assure that you surround yourself with people of your own intellectual level and common interests. To tell the kid otherwise is to set him up for failure, no matter where he goes to UG.</p>
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<p>Please note that <em>I</em> did not use the word “success” once. </p>
<p>Everyone knows what your perspective is. I’m talking about something else.</p>
<p>And I also agree with PizzaGirl.</p>
<p>MIT’s list of Strong Mathematics Graduate Programs at the bottom of this page may be helpful:</p>
<p>[MIT</a> Mathematics | Preparing For Grad School](<a href=“http://www-math.mit.edu/academics/undergrad/general/grad.html]MIT”>http://www-math.mit.edu/academics/undergrad/general/grad.html)</p>
<p>Your son sounds like a great kid! Good luck in helping him find a school that’s “just right” for him.</p>
<p>MIT might actually prefer this kid compared to HYP.</p>
<p>If we are not talking about success, what we are talking about? So, it is OK to go to HYP and start failing classes and get “something else” out of it? What is this “something else”? Name of place attached to your own? If this is enough for others, it is just not enough for me. I rather take free education at state school and make sure the kid achieves successfully whatever goal he has after UG (Grad. School, job position…), than pay huge tuition for “something else” in his life. But it is just me, apparently there are plenty of people with different prospective, which is completely acceptable. We all have different goals for our kids.</p>
<p>MiamiDAP, it is obvious that you will never get it. It appears that you simply cannot imagine someone wanting to go to college for reasons other than eventual admission to a high-paying career. Because you can’t comprehend it, you insist upon deriding it. </p>
<p>So be it.</p>
<p>Consolation, may I interpret? (At least, this is what I get out of MiamiDAP’s statement):
</p>
<p>I just understand the above statement as being her reflection on “fit” ~
personal preferences
peers, friends appropriate to you: intellectual level, common interests</p>
<p>Further, she indicates indirectly that a lack of fit ‘sets a student up for failure.’ I agree with her, and strongly. Understand that I myself mean by such “fit” not perfect ‘dream’ school which is the concrete embodiment of an unrealizable fantasy, but merely a sense of basic, genuine compatibility. Social fit, for example, is quite important. While the big name colleges like to be as diverse as possible, there are still many campuses which are rather homogeneous in one or more aspects; if you’re not a part of that group, it may be difficult to feel at home there. If a campus attracts an overload of nerds, or introverts, or quirky types, and you are not that, but someone has convinced you that the “name” of the school will benefit you uniquely in the future, that doesn’t help you necessarily produce as an UG, and your present shapes your future. And a core peer group which supports you there at that campus, and which can be expected also to support you later, is one of the biggest payoffs in attending a campus with good fit.</p>
<p>And I certainly can’t argue with her ‘hard work’ ethic.</p>
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<p>I don’t think that is what she means at all. In fact, she states the reverse.</p>
<p>This is what she said:</p>
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<p>Leaving aside the fact that she is obsessed with “success,” which is not what I was talking about AT ALL, she very specifically REJECTS the entire concept of “fit.” According to her it DOESN’T MATTER AT ALL where you go to college, although she does think it is a good thing to go to a place where you can outshine the competition. She apparently regards education solely as a competition with others, not as a personal, inner-focused thing. </p>
<p>I’ve read her posts on the subject of her talented and hard-working D’s success as a pre-med at Miami over and over and over again, and read her statements about how anyone who chooses to go to a “prestigious” school is a) deluded and b) just doing it for the name, and c) wasting a lot of money and so on and so forth. She is incapable of understanding the needs of, as an example, a highly-intellectual kid who is likely to study the humanities and not motivated by or particularly interested in pursuing a highly-paid career. She simply cannot imagine that for such a student the intellectual atmosphere of the school can make a huge difference, as can the people in their classes and the expectations of and intellectual values conveyed by their professors. (She’s not alone in that, of course.) In fact, she doesn’t seem to comprehend the idea that a school might even HAVE an intellectual atmosphere. The concept of intellectual motivation is apparently beyond her ken. I can imagine her reaction to the core at the U of C: a complete waste of time.</p>
<p>I think everyone has a valid point. Here is our experience – my son was miserable in elementary school. The teachers didn’t like him because he was disruptive in class. I had conferences with the school and even had him tested for disability. One day the school system was short of teachers and brought back a retired high school teacher. She immediately found the problem and moved him 3 grades up in math. We haven’t had a problem since.</p>
<p>A few years later when he no longer had math course to take in high school, he was sent to a community college and the problem started again. Not in grade but socially. With our previous experience we knew it’s probably the same issue so for the next college level course we insisted that he needed to go to the university in the area. He is fine again, very motivated.</p>
<p>This happened in his music study as well. He now frequently works and competes with the best young pianists in the country and around the world. I’ve seen a total transformation in his attitude towards music study, practice and appreciation.</p>
<p>I am convinced that he works better when surrounded by highly motivated folks who share the same value. But I also realize that no matters how intellectual the environment is, if he doesn’t want to work hard, it still won’t work.</p>
<p>As I’ve said before that my husband and I will be perfectly fine if he doesn’t end up in where he wanted. But the hard working path he put himself through during his grade school life trying to reach that goal is most important to us.</p>
<p>Consolation, you and I both quoted the exact same excerpt. You clearly have a much different interpretation than I have, of the same words. Perhaps you are correct, and her words should be contextualized within other threads as well, but that’s not what I was doing. The same words you use to indicate a disregard of individual fit are the ones that I interpret as respecting fit. I won’t refresh my previous words on this, except to note the following. </p>
<p>Here is what she said on this thread about intellectual peers:</p>
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<p>I don’t know, limited to this thread, how such a comment can compute with the following interpretation from you:</p>
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<p>I happen not only to believe, but to know, how important intellectual peer level is, and know how it can make, in your words, “a huge difference.” I do not dispute that. I’m merely saying that I don’t see where MiamiDAP disputes that.</p>
<p>fiveacres - I think you might be looking at all the wrong schools then. MIT and Caltech sound more appropriate for him if he can get in. HYP might be great schools but you go there for overall experience and not necessarily for academic rigor/challenge or really in your son’s case, overload (may be Princeton).</p>
<p>^Just as an example, my sister-in-law started off at Harvard. She had never written a paper before and turned out to have a disability regarding foreign language learning with the result that she flunked a couple of courses. She went home and went to the U of Florida for a couple of years. She got A’s easily, but missed the intellectual stimulation of Harvard. Lots of her tests at U of F were multiple choice, to her at least, it seemed like a pretty dumbed down education. I’m sure there were plenty of smart people there, but they weren’t the majority of any of her classes. She went back to Harvard, because it provided all the stuff Consolation was talking about. And yes, she was an English major not a pre-med where your peers matter more than your grades.</p>
<p>And as a contrast there is my son who considered going to Harvard, but ultimately decided Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon was a better fit. He determined at Accepted Students weekend that there were enough games playing/sci fi reading geeks that he could be happy there, but ultimately the department was just too small and too full of itself. I knew that given his sociableness (or lack thereof) he probably wouldn’t take advantage of the fact that Harvard is full of interesting people who aren’t like himself. He’s got more friends at CMU than he’s ever had in his life. And that’s a good thing.</p>
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<p>Back to the same tired argument that supposedly H, Y, and P are not “academically rigorous.” Sure, that’s why the strong majority of their incoming student bodies have the combined intellectual backgrounds that they do, and most often across-the-board (sciences, math, humanities, arts).</p>
<p>I strongly dispute that H, Y, and P are not academically rigorous. That said, many “lopsided” students (and OP’s son may very well fit the lopsided profile) choose environments where they can continue to be comfortably lopsided – such as CalTech, MIT. That part I agree with (and the only way I agree with your statement). There are also plenty of other schools which welcome and nourish the brains of lopsided students.</p>
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<p>Medical (and law) school admissions incentives probably do have some effect on undergraduate students’ goals in university.</p>
<p>epiphany - The fact that the brightest get admitted and go there does nt necessarily point to the rigor enforced on students when they take classes. I have heard of lots kids skating through taking the easy classes at Harvard and Yale if they wanted. Lot of them actually seem to go there so they can plan their futures (at least in Harvard’s case) and be happy in Yale’s case. OP’s son sounds like a kid who gets restless if the work is nt really challenging and if he is nt working really hard solving problems. He sure sounds lopsided if he has two true passions - math and music. He also seems to be exceeding his undergrad requirements already in math which means LACs may not be appropriate for him.</p>
<p>I am only pointing to HYP because those were listed as the top choices.</p>
<p>^Math 55 is one of the most rigorous and intellectually challenging math courses in the country. It even has a wikipedia page: [Math</a> 55 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55]Math”>Math 55 - Wikipedia) Music isn’t bad either. (There’s a reason YoYo Ma went there.)</p>
<p>mathmom - what about all the core requirements though?</p>
<p>Btw, I saw videos of CS50 online and they were amazing. I saw something like 8 hours of it and then kind of got out of it because I did nt have access to all the software being discussed.</p>