<p>I am very interested in studying Economics but I am no good at math. Somehow I was accepted into Emory, my top choice school. But it's expensive, very expensive and would mean significant loans.</p>
<p>My goal would be to the best I can in College, I see myself being very active in ECs, and hopefully I will be able to move on to grad school at an Ivy league or something similar after some work.</p>
<p>I'm having a hard time convincing my parents that the loans would be worth it. My parents make over 100k so I won't get much financial aid and my parents did not save for college (we're from out of the country and the initial expectation was for me to go to college outside the US). I'm unsure what to do. I visited Emory and loved it, I know I "should" go to Georgia Tech, it's nearly free but still...</p>
<p>I feel lucky that I get to decide between acceptances but saying no to emory would be torture.</p>
<p>Where you go for undergraduate isn’t all that important. The most important thing is to flourish in college. You said you wanted to be the best you could be in college. If you want to go to graduate school, having a great GPA is going to help you (would be much easier at Georgia Tech). Is Emory really worth that much more to you?!</p>
<p>In atlanta, Georgia Tech is highly regarded as Emory. Emory is very much up and coming school. It became very top notch after they got big Coca Cola money and hire away a lot of great professors from other schools starting in the 80s.</p>
<p>Georgia Tech is definitely much harder school than Emory U since it is mainly engineering school. If you keep 3.6 GPA, you can graduate with highest honor (top 5% in the class).</p>
<p>For anyone else with the same questions, as a liberal arts major at GT, I must say that the biggest reason that I chose GT over a purely liberal arts school is because if I were to pursue a degree in these areas, I can expect to generate greater interest in my undergraduate learning because of the GT’s approach of providing a technical basis to what are often theoretical subjects. Also, all of Georgia Techs liberal arts degrees are Bachelors of Science degrees rather than BAs which is another advantage when you are in the workforce.</p>
<p>However, that’s if you care to have such technical applications in your curriculum. If one is simply interested in graduate or professional school and is interested in the classical approach to teaching a field such as history, political science, or philosophy and you also want learning for learning’s sake and lots of support for pre-prof. and grad. endeavors, then Emory could be ideal. If the work force or the technical arena is where you wanna go, then Tech is awesome. If one has strength and interests across disciplines (math, science, humanities and social sciences) like a ton of people who attend Emory, it is much easier to have the cake and eat it too, doing a double major is very easy here. We have lots of joint majors for example. And some double majors are common (like econ. and math or chem. and math, chem and econ., some science plus history or political science). And by the way, anyone under the impression that Emory is really even close to a purely arts school is kind of wrong. Purely liberal arts schools rarely have undergraduate professional schools (maybe only engineering, but certainly not business and nursing). Emory is basically a pre-professional oriented school with a liberal arts approach/emphasis.</p>
<p>Why on Earth would you major in economics if you’re bad at math? And if you’re bad at math, how would you expect to leverage your economics degree into a related Ivy League graduate program?</p>
<p>Do you have a real interest in economics, or do you think that a choice sounds better than undecided? There is nothing wrong with undecided, college is about finding your interests and Emory is a great place for exploring.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, if one is not that great at math at Emory, they can probably survive the econ. program w/awesome grades. However, they won’t stand out vs. those with competencies (as in majors or minors) in CS or math and will look comparatively weak compared to peers w/in the program, many who may be double majoring with a science or something math even more math intensive than econ. Regardless, you have a point. A person weak at math would be screwed if they attended a top Ph.D program in econ. These programs represent the reality of economics. Upon arrival to a place like Harvard or Chicago, a person with a hate for math will be simply shocked and put to shame by the rigor of those programs.</p>