<p>@HSMCCP - 40k for a summer internship? Where? And most of the high-paying internships, at least on Wall Street, are exclusively for rising seniors.</p>
<p>^My cousin in Australia was paid 40k for an internship at McKinsey, albeit she did work a month over the standard summer internship time.</p>
<p>Also OP, I know this dude at Harvard, currently a third-year concentrating in Physics, who was in the same situation, if not even more conflicting, as you when he was a high school senior. He was a resident of Wisconsin as well. He had enough credits to graduate with 3 degrees, in Physics, Math, and German. However, he opted for Harvard, which provides a special program for extremely gifted students who face the same predicament as you. He is able to take grad-level physics and obtain both a bachelor’s and master’s degree. You could probably take some courses at Harvard Business School and fulfill an MBA, or go the Master’s Econ route.</p>
<p>So to the people saying “200k is not worth it for an undergraduate degree” – you are sorely mistaken. OP can procure both an undergraduate and a master’s degree if he goes to Harvard.</p>
<p>Moreover, he has met some pretty amazing people at Harvard with whom he has decided to build a solar tech startup with, just almost a year ago, and has made close to over a few million dollars a year from it. He had the basic scientific plan developed for the solar technology, but it was not without the collaboration of other minds gifted at the sciences and business at Harvard that truly allowed him to thoroughly develop and launch a business for it, as well as the networking opportunities and the name/prestige of Harvard that allowed him to receive financial backing from prominent investors around the world. He would have never been able to do the same had he stayed to graduate from UW. </p>
<p>If you think you have the ability to make something out of Harvard like he did, then go to Harvard. Otherwise, and I hate to say this, you will probably be set back to mediocrity like he did, had he stayed at UW. At this point, the cost of Harvard to him is trivial. To be fair, he already had his tuition paid off (and then some left over) through his success at a major research competition, but if he didn’t, he still would have been able to pay it all off with the amount of money he has made from his start-up, and still have enough money to buy the Lambo’s and vintage cars he has now. To top it all off, he will be graduating next year not with not only a BS in Physics from Harvard, but also a Master’s.</p>
<p>*like he would have</p>
<p>Holy crap. Glaringly stupid subjunctive error.</p>
<p>Apologies for necroing this thread, but it came up rather prominently in a Google search I did and it’s only a year old, so it seemed relevant enough to reply to.</p>
<p>I think most people here are underestimating how good of a school UW-Madison is, as well as how top notch some of its programs are. For example, if you plan on going into engineering or a science related field, going to UW is just as good if not better than Harvard. USNWR ranks UW’s undergrad program in chemical engineering #3 in the nation (and ahead of Harvard), its microbiology program grad program #3, and chemistry #7, to name a few. For business, yes, Harvard as whole is better, but even here UW is still good.</p>
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<p>UW’s student body is also excellent. Is it, top to bottom, filled with as many serious students as Harvard? No, I’ll freely admit that, but on a campus with 30,000 undergrads there are more than enough terrific and bright students. I went to UW-Oshkosh before I decided to transfer to UW, and at UW-Oshkosh I was rarely challenged, which was the opposite of my experience at UW.</p>
<p>All that being said, because the OP is planning on Econ, I’d probably recommend Harvard assuming the cost is feasible – I’m not a blind UW cheerleader, as I hope has been clear thus far. I did, however, want to point out that UW is not simply another “state school,” and the choices the OP presented are both terrific.</p>