Yes, Tigerle, I thought the same as you did about the OP’s stated preferences. She said that the Wellesley location was ideal because - among other factors - that it is safe. If you’re looking for safe, that’s not the Columbia neighborhood, especially for someone unfamiliar with NYC.
Like you, I thought that many of the things that she likes about the Wellesley location can be found at Vassar to one degree or another, more so than any of the other choices. If location is the primary factor and Wellesley is out, then I’d look closely at Vassar.
My child has the dream of her roommate being her BFF. She is wanting so badly to finally find people who are passionate about what they are studying and have simliar interests.
Just a comment on this. Colleges are in the business of assigning housing, not friends. Sometimes it works out great as far as friendship, but you might want to talk to DD about expectations. As long as she ends up with roommate(s) that treat her and her stuff with respect then anything more is good fortune.
As far as finding people passionate about studying and shared interests, they are there on every campus from the most humble CC to the most exalted Ivy. Maybe more at the latter. If she is willing to explore groups, talk to kids in the cafeteria and class, etc. then she will find her people.
My S got along ok with his freshman room mate, tho they never became bffs. They both liked to read but room mate was a early morning guy and was happy if he could sleep till noon (or later).
D had a stranger situation as she started in Jan and was added to a suite where one person had moved out and the other 3 had already been living together for a semester.
Both of them chose to live the following year with people from their home community. Both have friends from college, a decade later, as well as HS.
I have kind of hoped she might find a route like you desrcibed instead of being a doctor. My daughter was not a spike student. Every year our school picks a student of the year in each department, and she has won in every department from Languages to Fine arts to History and Science. If you were to look at her application , you might think she is a future CS major, she took 7 classes and got 9 certifcatiions. This year no teacher had the certifcations to teach certain CS classes so she is teaching. She took her first computer science class so she could make a video game based on a classic book she loved. She has won regional and national awards in CS but says it is not a career for her. It is just something fun and a useful skill for many careers.
She has studied for competetions or self study lots of areas of science. She won and engineering competition 4 years and Geology 5 years but said all it did was make her learn she would not want to study these subjects as a career.
Her reason behind neuroscience is personal. Our city lacks certain medical professionals. While we are landlocked , our city is growing and medical professionals just are not coming in certain fields. There is one neurologist for over 500k people. There is no one that is able do the testing for dementia/memory loss, there are a few people self trained working in the rehab side but outcomes are poor. My daughter is like the hope of someone who will come back and help. It is hard not to meet anyone in our community that does not have a story about a famiuly member or friend either dying without care, not being able to access care and having bad long term outcomes, and people losing their homes or savings trying to travel and get care. I feel lucky(not the part of paying 3k a month!) to have hung on to a grandmother pre-ACA plan so when our neurology nightmare happened, we were able to go to the Mayo Clinic. My daughter has spent weeks at the Mayo Clinic while our family got care and she sees what is possible. She has a desire to bring better care to her community. She has seen too many people suffer and I do not think she can get this image out of her head. It will not be any easy route or an easy job. She feels right now it is her calling and she has this community seeing her has the hope to return. I know it would be easy since she is great at CS and loves math (she does math for fun), and she has proven herself to be good at a variety of sciences , that there is an easier and sought after path for her. Maybe a professor will take her under their wing and show her other possiblites? The issue in her mind I know will be those at home waiting for her to return. If she studied in CS or math and got some great job , the community would be disappointed because so far that is what every smart kid they had hoped for has done. There have been a handful of students that went to medical school promising to come back and they do a residency in another state and love it and stay. Our community was built on homegrown doctors and professionals and it is just not happening.
I help with essays here on CC and cannot tell you how many kids want to do med school- and sometimes neuroscience- because of a family member or community need. This is a huge burden on a young person and personally, I would try to talk her out of this felt responsibility. An 18 year old needs to feel free to choose.
The path to neuroscience is a little different from neurology. I have a parent with dementia by the way, and we have not gone near a neurologist. There are people in rehab, hospice, and geriatric psychiatry who have been involved.
I really hope she doesn’t make decisions on this basis.
My son did CS and he has probably done more to help people than the average doctor. In fact, he has helped create a certain telehealth service that would probably help more people in your area than an MD. He loves it, just like your daughter.
And there are many other fields to think about as well as other ways to get involved in medicine- post bacc. PA’s, nursing, therapies. I hope she can choose based on where she will be happiest and not based on the future plans of an 18 year old who wants to rescue an entire community.
What is the best way to do this. We are in a different time zone. My daughter’s school has been fully open all year. On top of her challenging classes she takes , she teaches a class and is an aide in another so she is after school till 7pm or later EST. She leaves for school at 8am EST. All the times offered to talk to people at the colleges are between these hours. I could ask a list of question for her but I think it should be her. Right now she has joined some of those chat groups of future students but there is little interaction with current students. It is just students trying to find roommates or decide on the school.
Also are you just suppose to try and contact people that they email you as assigned or that offer to talk, like admissions, professiors or people head of clubs or groups? There is an employee at one of the colleges that recently moved from our area. I would love this person’s view point. from their bio, they lived in our area for a few years and then went to this college. They would be very familiar my child’s school and our life.
Most of the admissions people or interviewers have been clueless about our area. They think of our state and the flagship U city and our city is nothing like it. MIT was the only school I saw that grouped our city with another state which I feel is a much better fit.
I also would like to know what is okay to ask? or how to word it? so I can get a good answer. How do I word my daughter is from a rural landlocked conservative city, will she fit in? My daughter does not drink or smoke and hates smoke and does not want to party, is any admissions officer going to say we are a party school? My child wants to get into medical or grad school, what are your stats? I have seen schools stats vary by survery, I do not know what to trust? I feel like schools are going to try to sell themselves and hide the bad stuff. If someone were to ask me if they should send their kids to my kids high school, I would be very honest. My kid’s school is not for everyone. I just wonder how to get the real answers, not an answer like everyone is friendly to everyone, and if you work hard you will get into medical school, and our school is academic and not a party school.
I’m curious when you say your child is from a rural area and then describe your community as having 500,000 people. That’s a city, not rural, it seems. I don’t know if your D wants to go to college in a city or suburb or rural (she applied to Columbia, Penn, and Harvard, which are all urban, and then there’s Hamilton, Bowdoin, and Dartmouth which are rural). But I don’t think her acclimation to a college in a city is going to be problematic.
The schools are flexible. If they want her, they’ll find a time. During a lunch break, on a weekend, in the evening when the school official might be at home but still working.
If the school isn’t flexible, maybe it’s not the school for her.
Right, arrange to do it during lunch break, evenings, or weekends. Also, a lot of seniors are visiting campuses to make their decisions, if possible and missing school to do so. If you cannot do that, I understand, but your D can arrange to miss a class to do this.
My Oxford Maths & CS son who is going to work as a trader post-graduation is actually doing his masters thesis on AI and training a computer to read medical imaging in order to mechanize certain radiology tasks.
Suggestion: Have your D connect with current students and recent alumni, not the admissions officers, to get the “real scoop”…have her talk to more than one at each school. If she could have visited, she would hopefully have done this and so should do it now long distance. This could also be done in the evenings and weekends. If you don’t know anyone attending, try to find an online group and reach out. If that doesn’t work, ask the admissions office to line up some current students for her to talk to. They will be hand picked by the adcoms, and not random, but it is better than not talking to any current students.
PS…even here on CC, there is a forum for each college. A post could be made and ask if there are any current students or recent alums willing to chat with D who is admitted.
When she was accepted, I assume there were contact names, numbers, email addresses if she had any questions. Perhaps a specific AO has mailed, emailed, called her to establish personal contact. She then can email the most likely admissions officer and just simply ask for contact details (email most likely) of a student that shares her interests. Maybe she can request to see if there is a student who shares her interest and also comes from a non central urban area. She then can arrange a time to call, FT, Zoom, whatever with that student at a mutually convenient time. Students generally are pretty open about their experiences. Sometimes it is not what they say but how they say it or don’t say.
In terms of career/graduation outcomes, most schools will direct you to someone at career services who should have that info available, e.g. how many students successfully get into med school each year (as a number and a percent), what were their majors, which schools did they get into, what was the median GPA and MCAT scores of the successful applicants. Similar questions can be asked of grad school or research jobs.
The simplest response would be through statistics. Hamilton students stay and graduate from their school within four years at nearly the highest rate in the nation, which tends to indicate a very high degree of satisfaction with their choice: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/highest-grad-rate.
With respect to attributes of evident interest to the OP’s daughter, Hamilton students value their classroom experience to a notably high degree based on survey data:
For a subjective impression regarding the type of students she would encounter, this excerpt from the linked interview would be worth considering:
Our city is very different. It very landlocked so it is labelled rural. It has been growing so fast. The hospital takes care of 500k which is the region. Our city has 100k and including the suburbs it is at 200k. Just to explain growth, in the mid 90’s there was 25k people . There is no downtown or big businesses. It is just a small city that was a truck stop between two major cities that grew. Because it offered low taxes, cheap housing, safe community, and cheape utilites the city kept growing but it is almost all resdiential.
My daugter had a chart, the school had to have what she wanted to study, good financial aid, and be in a certain region. My daughter has had dreams of certain aspects of a big city her whole life. She wanted it as an option. We travel for medical care to big cities and she is able to go off to museums and places of interests fine by herself. She does not drive and has never been in a ridehare so she can navigate transit. Then 90% of her life is in this landlocked area that has very little to do but is a quiet safe place. I think she wanted options to choose from and COVID might have made her a little more leary of a city choice. The major cities we visit are not the same (crime and safety wise not judging rules or things being closed) .
Why does it matter that your D is from a “rural landlocked conservative city?” First, how can a place be both rural and a city? What is the big deal that it is landlocked? Lots and lots of the states are landlocked. At highly selective colleges, students come from all 50 states, many different countries, and from urban, suburban, and rural settings, and diverse backgrounds. That is one of the values of top colleges, the varied student body. They all find a way to fit in and find their people. Going to college is about spreading one’s wings. As mentioned earlier, my daughters grew up a truly rural area in a town of 1700 people where we had no neighbors. All the students at school were Caucasian. They went to college in cities. They valued and met very diverse students from a wide range of backgrounds. That made it awesome. And what does it matter that your city is conservative when you already stated that your own D is not conservative. So, she may like finding her peeps! Besides, students of different political persuasions are at these schools.
IN terms of partying, this exists at every college. Your D will need to find her type of friends to hang out with and she will. Some colleges even have substance free dorms if she cares about that.
Again, your D can get the scoop and ask whatever she wishes of current students and recent alumni, rather than ask the adcoms who are obviously biased about their school. I suggest she do that.
When your D originally made her college list, did she look into these things then? Something made her put these schools on her list.
I didn’t see your post before I just posted @RuralCityMom. It seems you live in a small city, not a rural area. I realize it ain’t like NYC or Boston, but it is still a small city. You mention no downtown or big businesses. I understand. But that is nothing like what I think of as rural. My kids grew up in rural Vermont. I saw the subject heading of your thread and it piqued my interest because my girls grew up on a dirt road in the mountains in a tiny town where you cannot walk to anything and there is no public transit or even a traffic light. They went to colleges in cities (one went to Brown, then MIT, then Berkeley and one went to NYU). They had NO problem adjusting. The “landlocked” point has me stymied. Vermont is landlocked but I never gave that a second thought that my girls then went to colleges on the coast. You mention there is a hospital. Our town had no hospital. Just one doctor’s office. It was 30 miles to the nearest hospital.
Is there any way you can go visit the campuses your D got into? If not, can you visit one city and one truly rural college in your state to get the feel of types of college environments that may help your D decide that one factor?
It doesn’t matter if your D grew up in a quiet place (it could not be nearly as quiet as where my kids grew up!). College is an opportunity to try something new. I’m not trying to push an urban school, but your D had some on her list. Even though the lifestyle in the cities my girls went to college in and both now live in Manhattan are WORLDS apart from our home on a dirt road where they could not see another home or walk to anything, and the town pretty much shuts down at 6 PM, they love their new experiences! Your D is not gonna be the only kid at these elite colleges who grew up in a small city, a rural area, a landlocked area, a conservative state, and so on. This is the beauty of top colleges…the diversity of backgrounds. If your D wanted to be with others with a similar background, she could attend her state U.
While it’s true that Hamilton registers the highest entering profile on some academic aspects among the LACs relevant to this topic (e.g., students from the top 10% of their high schools classes), other entering statistics overlap, and, in any case, may differ from those which formed the base for the graduation rate statistics posted above.
How far back would you say to go with alumni to get what a current experince is like? Our area has no alunmi that we can find from any school. I contacted the 1 person I knew that went to Amherst, they went over 30 years ago and they have had a great career but they said the school and times have changed so much they could not give an opinion on the current school.
Is 10 years maybe a good cut off?
How is best to find alumni. I would be inetrested in outcomes and feelings after the fact more then current students. I think my child would be interested in current students. I know when I went to college if you asked me one week, I would say I was unahppy because of a roommate and another week I loved it because of a project was working on. I have tried not to bring much of my experinces in college (I went to school in MA) to my child’s decision because , just like the person I knew from Amherst , my college is so different 25+ years later. I have not mentioned where I went to school, but my daughter will not attend there and I think it is one of the better choices. Not because it is where I went to school. They actually did not do anything special because my child was a legacy. They offer a native speaker to help her goals of fluency as a buddy, the sciences are very collaborative, hey invited her without her asking to play her instrument and made it known her skills were needed, the dorms is exactly what she wants. I did not push because she wants her own legacy school and it was one of the worst financial aid packages (but doable). But maybe it is because I know the school, I knew about the language buddies and some of the programs and how the dorms work and we just need more information on other schools to find those areas.