<p>my d wants to go to cornell. She has almost perfect scores and a high gpa. She will end up in the top 5 in her class. She is taking 8 ap's this year. I want to know what is special about cornell over the other ivy's except that is beautiful has a tremedous amount of course offerings and has great food!</p>
<p>I want to know also; bump it.</p>
<p>Which college in cornell is she looking at?</p>
<p>And what is she intending to study? (We could go list everything that's great about cornell, but it would be a bit easier just to list the pertinent information)</p>
<p>On a separate note, the Fisk Guide to Colleges (get the current one) is an excellent resource for the rising senior. It gives a wholistic evaluation of the school, quantitative stats, application information, and overlap (similar) schools. It helped me greatly in selecting other schools to apply to. However, I didn't have to send any of those apps out, to my great relief ;).</p>
<p>One thing about the general college search: You can't know what you want until you experience it. By that, I mean that your D must visit a diverse bunch of campuses (campi? heheh) to find out what she wants in terms of atmosphere. Small, big, urban, rural, spread out, confined, non-existant (NYU?:p), warm, cold, etc.. This will give her an idea of what she wants and will make it much easier to choose schools to put her effort into when doing applications. There are also some books out about campus visits (I got mine on <a href="http://www.amazon.com%5B/url%5D">www.amazon.com</a> I think that help students identify the things to look for.</p>
<p>On a personal note, when I stepped on cornell's campus, I got "a feeling" as you might say. There was just something special about it that clicked with me. I got this at a few other places, Wesleyan, for example, but the atmosphere at some schools just felt completely right, whereas others were merely "nice."</p>
<p>We'll get back to you when we know a little more about what your D is looking for.</p>
<p>As a parent, I found it helpful when my son was looking at schools to read the archives on CC (both current and on the old CC-link is at the bottom of the page). Many current students and alumni write about the good and the bad about their schools. Here is the link to just one recent thread about Cornell: <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=64360%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=64360</a> For me, reading old threads helped provide a sense of the day to day life and college culture beyond the statistics and sterotypes presented in books.</p>
<p>My son also had stellar grades, test scores and profile, but after looking at nearly all of the Ivies, and doing some repeat visits, he decided to apply Ed to Cornell. He will be starting in August. The more he visited, the more he liked the school, the people he met, the academics, the social atmosphere, the traditional large campus environment set in a college town, etc. PM me if you would like more specifics.</p>