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<p>Yes, totally false, The cases you cite are people who have degrees from top GRADUATE programs. An undergraduate degree from Baylor coupled with time abroad as a mission worker is not going to gain much traction except at a Christian school where religious belief is more important than scholarship.</p>
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<p>Exactly.</p>
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<p>Oh, please. Even Dubya went to Yale. You would seriously advocate turning down Yale for Baylor because of a couple of trips home??? There just is no comparison at all: why do you think Baylor is so eager to give significant $$ to students with the OP’s stats? Because they just don’t attract students of that caliber that often.</p>
<p>If you DON’T get into Yale and don’t get sufficient money elsewhere, then by all means go to Baylor. But don’t make up your mind until you see the $$.</p>
<p>Wait until you get a FA offer (and an acceptance letter) from Yale before you make this decision… There’s no reason not to apply, if you’d be happy there – the application fee’s pretty steep, but not THAT high!=P</p>
<p>On another note, there are a thousand and one variables that go into whether or not you could end up as a professor one day… Right now you’re a senior – none of these people have any clue how your life’ll end up, or the choices you’ll make, so it’s best not to worry about that, at the moment.</p>
<p>Out of curiosity, is there a reason why Columbia or Tufts isn’t on your list considering your interest in IR?</p>
<p>OP, you have a great chance of getting into an Ivy league school. I would encourage you to aim high. i want to share an email that i received from my brother today. (by the way, my son is a senior in HS. Some background info, my brother is a partner with one of the top consulting firms in the world).</p>
<p>he wrote:
I have a recent story to share with you about a girl I interviewed. She was top of her class in beijing in high school and was accepted into columbia, university of chicago and amherst. She chose amherst due to scholarship and liberal arts orientation. After college she could not get the best jobs and landed in roland berger (a 2nd tier consultancy). She is using her family connection (senior politician) to get into xxxx but at this point, she has a second rate resume. We decided to turn her down. In her case, she made the “wrong” call for colleage for sure. This will hunt her again when she applies to business school later. </p>
<p>All the Best!</p>
<p>@atxnickg,</p>
<p>Congratulations on being a NMSF. As a 1st generation student, that is especially impressive!</p>
<p>I’m not clear on what it is you really want career-wise: a professor career or a foreign-service career? Perhaps it’s not entirely clear to you, too. If you want a foreign service career, in college you should focus on getting a solid education and NOT focus on international relations. </p>
<p>I have had a long international career (and continue to do so) and have many expatriate friends from very different arenas: diplomatic, NGO, United Nations, multi-nationals, teaching. While I know how the int’l circuit in my arena works, I have asked my friends in the other arenas for advice for my son, should he want to pursue that path. These senior-level people all give the same advice regardless of their arena: you need to get established in your own discipline first before you approach these int’l organizations. These organizations do not want applicants with no work experience; they want experienced: lawyers, teachers (of all kinds, not just ESL), economists, engineers, urban planners, finance-types, etc. They don’t need fresh-out-of-school graduates with a degree in int’l relations. Just so you know, language interpreters are a dime-a-dozen.</p>
<p>If you genuinely like Baylor, and are being offered such a fantastic package, then I would go for it! </p>
<p>Don’t fixate on int’l relations—the int’l opportunities will come later. Even foreign language fluency, while definitely a good-to-have, is not absolutely necessary.</p>
<p>If you really enjoy the foreign service lifestyle, you can do it for your entire career and not just think of it as a temporary gig until you come back to the U.S. to assume a “real” career.</p>
<p>It sounds like you truly like Baylor. Most of the schools on your list aren’t significantly more prestigious than Baylor are they, not 50K/yr worth?</p>
<p>The only one that really sticks out is Yale. And maybe you’d get a great FA package there. I go with the other posters and wait till you see your FA at the accepted schools, and then make the decision. A little extra to go to Yale would be worth it, a lot extra to go to the other schools probably wouldn’t be.</p>
<p>Consolation–if he wants to study foreign languages and be a professor, spending time abroad, learning the language is essential to getting into a PhD program, period. The cases I sited they did not go to Ivy’s for their Master’s degree…they got their PhD’s at an Ivy, actually had a handful of options at several top PhD programs, again, coming out of an UG no one has heard of and going to a state flagship for their Master’s degrees…but if you think you MUST go to an Ivy to get that, how about if you pay for it for the OP. This kind of talk is EXACTLY what I was talking about. It’s snobbery, nothing more. There are 1000’s of people that get PhD’s from schools other than Ivy’s that are doing JUST FINE.</p>
<p>Yale doesn’t have an ESL major, why would you apply there?</p>
<p>OP,
Chances are that you will study abroad while at Baylor in one of those FL you plan to study.
Also, in the future, if you are accepted into a Ph.D. program in FL, you will also do overseas study.</p>
<p>Unless you were debating the option of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford or if the free ride was from South Harmon Ins. Tech, I would give a different response. Considering it is Baylor offering the free ride, in my opinion, that is the route to take, unless UVA or Yale offered you FA.</p>
<p>Entry level ESL jobs abroad are still possible for healthy young BA graduates who are willing to take a quickie course offered by the place where they will teach, and then live on a minimal income in that location.</p>
<p>If you want ESL certification that is transportable from one country (or even one school) to another, the minimum certification would be a CELTA course. If you want a chance at a living wage, and true career opportunities, you need at bare minimum, a B Ed in TESOL from one if the colleges that offer that in their teacher training programs. For a job in a college or university ESL program, you will need an M Ed in TESOL.</p>
<p>OP: Refine your college search for specific programs that match your interests & further progress toward your goal(s). Apply & wait unrtil all offers are in–unless faced with a deadline–before deciding.</p>
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<p>You seem to have completely misunderstood everything I said. </p>
<p>In the first place, I said that the student should carefully consider a decision between Yale and Baylor <strong><em>IF</em></strong> he gets into Yale and <strong><em>IF</em></strong> Yale offers him FA that puts the cost in the same ballpark as the deal he expects to get from Baylor. I said that ONLY HE could make this decision for himself, based on HIS OWN criteria. </p>
<p>I said NOTHING about an “Ivy at any price” strategy.</p>
<p>Secondly, I said NOTHING whatever about getting a PhD at an Ivy, I said “top program.” Top programs in various fields are located at a wide variety of universities. Some are at Ivies, sure, but many are not. Are you SERIOUSLY going to maintain that newly-minted PhDs from anything other than top programs in their field are getting tenure-track academic jobs nowadays?</p>
<p>YOU seem to be the one with the Ivy obsession.</p>
<p>And if I had a dollar for every high school senior who was planning on getting a PhD and ended up doing something else- I’d be able to retire.</p>
<p>OP- send out the applications. Wait until April. If Yale is unaffordable and you are still excited about Baylor over all your other options than your decision is easy. If Yale costs the same as Baylor then you can start making decision trees and charts and excels and all the other things that the parents on here will suggest. And you can trigger one more round of “is it worth going to a prestigious U where I will be surrounded by prestige hounds?”</p>
<p>Other parents- relax. The likelihood that his kid (OP- you seem terrific so this is not a dig at you) is going to actually end up executing a plan that his 17 year old self thought up is pretty close to zero. So warning him about the dangers of trying to get a tenure track job in International Relations is absurd. Or trying to explain the lunacy of going to Yale which doesn’t have a degree program in ESL.</p>
<p>Kids go to college. Their minds expand (that’s kind of the point.) They end up majoring in something they’ve never heard of. They graduate and get a job in something that they had never heard of when they were back in their high schools and everyone was either a teacher or a dentist or owned a karate studio. Again, part of the point of going to college. This apocalyptic warnings of young kids that they will end up in debt and unemployed if they do anything but take the free ride so they can major in whatever it is that some HS guidance counselor suggested to them back in 10th grade is sort of mean.</p>
<p>No, don’t saddle yourself with debt you’ll never get out from. But that doesn’t mean all debt is bad, nor does it mean that the free ride is always your best option.</p>
<p>I would be hard pressed to imagine a career path in international relations or anything remotely aligned that would be “better” coming out of Baylor than Yale (you can do a quick google search of the number of Yalies at the World Bank, CIA, State Department, or the top 20 NGO’s. And forget former Presidents and US Senators, some of whom dabbled a bit in International Relations.) But that’s hardly the point.</p>
<p>OP- wait until April when you’ve got the cards and the price tags on the table.</p>
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<p>It would be lunacy for someone of the OPs academic potential to take a degree in ESL, even if the initial aim was to teach English as a second language.</p>
<p>Consolation, shrub went to Yale after his family paid for 2 years of finishing school in Massachusetts. Money wasn’t much of a problem for them, obviously. Airfare alone for 2 round trips a year adds $1000, and that’s if parents never visit, and she never comes home during the term or (god forbid) gets sick or has an emergency. If a family is already carefully watching the bottom line, a grand or more just for travel is something to be considered.</p>
<p>I think you’ll have to see how it plays out. But I work in the foreign NGO field, and I can’t see how a Yale degree is going to help you more than a Baylor degree in doing Mission work (and might actually hurt). Mission work has lots to do with religious commitment, and while you could have yours at Yale, Baylor is a school where that quality would be highly prized, and the contacts in mission fields will be better.</p>
<p>Baylor offers no fewer than 26 discipline-specific mission trips and opportunities for undergraduates; how many does Yale offer? What kinds of opportunities and seminars in Global Mission Leadership does Yale offer? How many international students come to Yale (say, the school of social work or the school of nursing) with the explicit purpose of returning to their home countries for the purpose of doing mission work?</p>
<p>@Saltwater, Phillips Andover Academy is not a finishing school</p>
<p>My apologies, a finishing school is traditionally for young women. He went to a private boarding school established 230 year ago that, this year, costs $44,500 a year. Again, the point was that cost of travel was not an issue for him, but could be for some families.</p>
<p>My daughter is a National Merit Scholar and in the middle of her senior year at Baylor. Her full ride has provided a great education and tremendous opportunities. We have never been disappointed in the level of challenge or opportunities available. </p>
<p>As others have recommended, apply to Yale and any other universities you are interested in and once responses are back make your decision. You have a great future ahead of you with a variety of choices.</p>