<p>well what i was saying was that the probability that you would get into exactly one hypsm is extremely low. picking stanford over harvard, wouldnt hurt my conscience. i know people who are happy to have picked yale over harvard and princeton over harvard and stanford.</p>
<p>really, all these schools are at the same level, and if you're destined for greatness you'll achieve it from any of these places.</p>
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<blockquote> <p>congrats on ur daughter's acceptances. just wondering, did she have a perfect gpa? and if not, did she have some sort of nationally recognized award to make up for it?<<</p> </blockquote>
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<p>No, she got one B (in German). The only national award she got was being a National Merit SF/F/Scholar. Though I don't know whether that specifically "made up" for anything.</p>
<p>I live a few miles from Harvard, and pass by there almost every day. The campus is beautiful. Harvard Square, though, is as much a part of campus as Harvard Yard. If you don't like that, then it's probably not the best choice.</p>
<p>On the other hand, Harvard is very much a university in ways that Dartmouth, Brown, Princeton, and even Yale aren't. Harvard has twice as many GSAS (grad) as CAS students, and their professional schools are also huge. If you go to Harvard, you will not have full access to professors and other university resources in the same way that students at the other schools you're applying to will, simply because there are so many graduate students competing for those same resources.</p>
<p><guess the="" main="" reason="" people="" even="" wanna="" go="" to="" an="" ivy="" is="" because="" of="" name="">
I beg to differ...and the only thing turning me off about the school right now is the name
sakky, i agree completely</guess></p>
<p>I was in the same position as you last year. Aside from my EA application to Yale, I had decided all of the other schools I was or wasn't going to apply to if I didn't get in, except Harvard. At first I was very anti-Harvard, but one of my teachers whose husband was a Harvard alum and one of my friends who was a freshman at Harvard started pushing me to apply. When I got deferred EA, I was still sort of ambivalent about Harvard, but I figured that there were things I liked and their application wasn't too much extra work so I decided why not apply? I guess what I am trying to say with all this rambling is that if you are ambivalent about applying to a particular school and the cost (in both time and money spent on the application) of applying isn't too great for you, it wouldn't hurt to apply on the off-chance that you end up getting in. By the time April came around and I was accepted at both Harvard and Yale I ended up giving Harvard a much closer look than anticipated and I came very close to choosing to go there instead of Yale.</p>
<p>why would you be turned off by the name, LAgal? i think we've all grown up in a generation that has been awed by the name harvard. as a child, i never thought for a minute that i would attend harvard. the name was so prestigious that it was almost mythical. now, it's a reality, and i'm ready to contribute to and take on that prestige =)</p>
<p>ah coureur your post is unbelievably reassuring to me. i was worried about a foolish B i got in french junior year, and i am a national merit sf (finalist comes out in february). im still kicking myself for that B, because it was entirely my fault (not doing hwk, etc).</p>
<p>-and ivyleague, some people get turned off by the notion of crimsons being stuck up. i used to hold that image of harvard, but it was erased when i visited and spoke to people who go/went there.</p>
<p>I got one B in high school and one or two B+s almost every semester of high school. Not to mention about half of my As were A-s. I still got into Harvard without any national recognition or anything.</p>
<p>"why would you be turned off by the name, LAgal?"...almost everyone i know considers me to be modest, so i'd feel akward going to such a prestigious school...not to mention, people abuse the name...like nearly everyone else has said, they go to the school only for the name...that generally doesn't happen at less well-known universities where students attend not b/c of the name but b/c they genuinely want to be there...
not to mention that, because it is harvard, so many ppl apply just for the heck of it and b/c of them, esp those who know b4 they send in their app that, even if they got in, they wouldn't go, the school is so hard to get into</p>
<p>I have some concerns about Harvard's curriculum. Classes appear (based on what I've seen on the website and heard from an alum) to reflect the faculty research interests more than they should-- the freshman English courses, for example, are on fairly specialized topics, and Shakespeare isn't taught that I could find until the sophomore year. That I could find, the idea of the survey course is more or less nonexistent at Harvard. Are these impressions accurate?</p>
<p>All Harvard freshmen take expository writing. It's a writing course designed to teach not only the technical aspects of good writing but also to teach critical thinking and analysis of difficult topics. Given those goals, it's not uncommmon for professors to focus on topics of interest to them - where they can readily pose challenging questions. This is the way the course is specifically designed. I'm not sure that this means that it reflects the profs' interests more they it should. I mean who determines how much reflection of the the profs' interest is correct?</p>
<p>Also, Expos isn't really an English class - there's an entire English department with classes of its own to take, most of which can be taken at any point during your undergraduate career, including freshman year. For example, right now, I'm taking Expos and an English class on the 19th century American novel. For the most part, the courses you take aren't limited by your grade level, and I'm almost positive you can take a course on Shakespeare during freshmen year.</p>
<p>My concern isn't really about specific classes. It's just that-- it seemed to me, looking through the course descriptions of a few departments of areas of interest to me-- there were an awful lot of classes that dealt with very specific areas of their fields, even at the introductory level, and would therefore be of relatively limited use to students with less experience in that field. It appears to me-- though I sincerely hope I'm wrong-- that Harvard's idea of "general education" is manifest in having students take specialized classes in disparate areas, rather than generalized classes in all areas and specialized classes in one or two. Is that impression correct?
I guess what I'm getting at is that Harvard's curriculum is not necessarily conducive to creating "big picture," generally educated students, who have a solid understanding of the sweep of intellectul history. It seems rather conducive to creating brilliant analysts and careful specialists. In my 200-level poetry class at Sewanee, for example (I'm a high school student, but taking college classes) almost everyone except me has read Dante, including a Chemistry major, just because Sewanee strongly recommends that all students interested in majoring or minoring in English take the class on Dante and Homer towards the beginning of their studies. Though Harvard must in most ways be a much better school than Sewanee, the fact that it does not always require of its students that kind of basic grounding in intellectual history seems potentially a major failing.</p>
<p>fiddlefrog, it sounds like you're looking for the kind of education that Columbia or Chicago would provide. Both schools have rigorous Great Books core curriculums, and many people who go there choose those schools precisely because they're looking for "generalized classes in all areas and specialized classes in one or two". In fact, Chicago doesn't even let students double major.</p>
<p>Personally, I'm not applying to either school, mainly because I've read all their core-curriculum books during high school, and I'm looking forward to specializing. If that kind of general education is what you're looking for, though, both of those schools are amazing.</p>