<p>Hello cc! I'm refining my once long college list to a manageable size of 4 or so. My number one school, by far, is Tufts. I love the location, the feel of the campus, and it's amazing study abroad program. However, tufts engineering is not highly ranked and I'm worried I won't be able to get into a prestigious grad school afterwards or do any internships/ research while I'm there.</p>
<p>My number 2 school is Georgia tech. I would be in-state so the tuition would be low, ~30 minutes away from home, excellent internship/research opportunities, and highly ranked it engineering. The only problem with tech is that I don't like the feel of the campus at all and for college I would like to be further away from home. </p>
<p>The other lower ranked colleges on my list are Columbia, Swarthmore, Berkeley, CMU, NYU, and Brown.</p>
<p>I'm still not 100% sure I want to major in engineering. My other interests include international relations, Spanish, and maybe dentistry. Out of my much varied list, which college would you suggest for me? Thank you in advance.</p>
<p>just a little bump…</p>
<p>So your goal is to get into a prestigious grad school? This should be the last thing on your mind when you pick colleges.</p>
<p>Hypothetically say you end up going to Tufts, and you are the top Engineering student in the entire university in your class. Does that going to mean you are not going to go to a top grad school? No. Just going to a prestigious engineering program does not guarantee graduate school admission. You have to be a good student regardless of where you go, and do well on Graduate exams.</p>
<p>Personally, I recommend going someplace new for college. That’s what I did, and I still think it was a good decision. I grew up in NC, and I go to California for school. It almost feels like I’m studying in a different country at times. </p>
<p>As far as the schools lower on your list, the first thing that comes to mind is do you want to live in the middle of a big city or are suburbs okay? Columbia, NYU, and a few more on your list are smack dab in the middle of giant cities. Do you prefer that? </p>
<p>In the end, no one is going to be able to tell you what college you go to. Whatever you think about college, most of the factors now are going to seem a lot less important when you get there. You haven’t picked any horrendous choices; people excel at all the colleges you listed and like doing so. And as far as majors, even if you don’t like engineering, you’ll find something you do like wherever you go too.</p>
<p>Cross Berkeley off the list. It isn’t worth $50K/year to go there as an OOS student when you can get large classes and an impersonal feeling for much less elsewhere.
Kind of a red flag here, since the dropout rate for engineering nationwide is 33-50%. A lot of these kids are plenty smart enough to make it thru, but get worn down by the intense workload and see their friends majoring in things like Spanish and Int’l Relations having much more fun and free time in college. This isn’t a prediction about what you will do, but you ought to at least tilt your search towards schools you’d still be glad to attend if you switch out of engineering.</p>
<p>Cross NYU off for not giving good aid and also being >$50K/year.</p>
<p>Thanks for the responses. And mikemac, that’s why I want to go to Tufts. If I dropout of engineering, I would still have a strong liberal arts education to fall on unlike tech. Also, I don’t care if the college is in the city or the suburbs. As long as I’m not in the middle of nowhere, I’m fine.</p>