<p>self-explanatory</p>
<p>what the...haha</p>
<p>?????</p>
<p>I'm completely torn, I just can't make this decision. The main thing i liked about amherst is its personal attention and feeling of "you can do whatever you want". however, im a city girl at heart, and i cant help but feel like the town of amherst is a little bit well....sleepy. cambridge is a much more exciting place.</p>
<p>on the other hand, i can only go to a place like amherst once, and there is always grad school for harvard.</p>
<p>please help.</p>
<p>"there is always grad school for harvard."</p>
<p>ALWAYS? No, there isn't. You'll have a long shot for grad school at Harvard, just like you had a long shot at Harvard College. If you want to go, go now.</p>
<p>She has a better chance getting into Harvard than Amherst for grad school...</p>
<p>If you plan to go to graduate school, you will have better chance to get in. GradCafe</a> - Graduate School Admission Resource
Amherst will give you better undergrauduate education. Harvard will pretend to care about you. Amherst will do it from their heart.</p>
<p>i meant "always" in the sense that there is always an opportunity to go to a place like Harvard (large, prestigious university), whereas there is not always an opportunity to go to a place like Amherst (small, liberal arts college)</p>
<p>How many Amherst admitees were also accepted, or could have been accepted, to Harvard? And vice versa? This may be a consideration for you. Other than having highly intelligent students, Harvard & Amherst are different. Not an easy dilemma to resolve.</p>
<p>H will give the obvious advantages; if you are intending to do your UG in the areas that Amherst specifically outshines every other college choose Amherst.</p>
<p>the amherst student that called me to answer my questions chose amherst over harvard. she said she liked the personal attention from amherst, the small classes and close student body, and all the opportunities with research that were readily available for every student. it's a tough decision but you have to think about what you're really looking for in an undergrad education.</p>
<p>You know the pros and cons</p>
<p>However, speaking as someone who attended Harvard for graduate school, but a small LAC for college (Haverford, albeit some years ago) I disagree with Hanna's comment that "You'll have a long shot for grad school at Harvard." No one that I remember in my grad department attended Harvard undergrad. If you work hard and do well at Amherst I would think you'd have an excellent chance to be admitted to top grad schools.</p>
<p>It's a tough choice. My son has a similar dilemma- trying to decide between Harvard and Swarthmore. Harvard's great, but it's probably hard to duplicate the sense of community you'll get at any small LAC. </p>
<p>As an aside - I felt like I was treated much more like an adult at Haverford (with it's honor code) than at Harvard. Have no idea how that would be at Amherst.</p>
<p>"If you work hard and do well at Amherst"</p>
<p>You don't think that's a gigantic IF? Everyone in the entering class at Amherst intends to work hard and do well. But 50% of them will be in the bottom half of the class. Which grad program at Harvard is realistic for those kids? Maybe the Ed School -- maybe. Harvard Law accepts less than a third of the Harvard undergrads who apply, and of course many of those who would like to attend don't waste time applying because they know they won't get in. Other high-profile grad programs like HMS and many of the PhD courses are exponentially tougher. The vast majority of the bright, hard-working kids on CC will not be accepted into grad programs at HYPSM four years from now.</p>
<p>OP, if you want to go to Amherst, go to Amherst. But don't make that decision under the assumption that you'll get another chance to go to Harvard (or its peers). Personally, I'm a city girl, and I found a small LAC limiting; I thought it was very safe and very dull. If Amherst struck you as sleepy and not very exciting on a short visit when everything there was novel to you, well, I'd be concerned about how sleepy it will seem in two or three years when it's the same old, same old.</p>
<p>Also, what do you mean when you say you can "do whatever you want" at Amherst as opposed to Harvard? You mean because Harvard has distribution requirements?</p>
<p>I am a very hardworking student, and i cant imagine myself not doing well wherever i go (not being cocky, just being honest).</p>
<p>I am a city girl, but the town itself of amherst wasnt really a drawback. its sort of neutral to good in my mind, but obviously cambridge is a more exciting and vibrant town. when i visited amherst and did an overnight it was hard to tell exactly what the social life was like (it was a Sunday during midterm week...no parties or anything really going on). it seemed a little sleepey to be honest but from what ive heard from students that weekend was very a-typical socially.</p>
<p>what i mean by "do whatever i want" at amherst is that well a. there are no distribution requirements and b. you work really closely with the faculty. if you havea n interesting idea for a research project or something, i feel like you are more likely to get a faculty helping you with it at amherst than at harvard, despite the fact that harvard is a research university. i feel like spots for research and close projects with the professors might be more difficult to get (correct me if i am wrong about this).</p>
<p>basically, right now i am feeling like amherst would have a more quality education and better quality of life, but harvard would be more exciting, and result in more life experiences and independence.</p>
<p>what i mean by "i woudl have another chance at harvard" is not even that i would necessarily get admitted to harvard for grad school, or even yale stanford penn etc, but that i would still have the opportunity to do something in a large, vibrant city at some point in my life. </p>
<p>also keep in mind--all the kids at harvard intend to do well also, but 50 percent of them are also in the bottom half of the class, meaning the harvard grad programs are no more realistic. the kids who got accepted to harvard are no different than the kids who got into amherst---it all seems to be basically luck of the draw.</p>
<p>Both are great, but I would recommend choosing Harvard over Amherst unless you honestly have a chance to visit each for 2-3 days, talk with tons of faculty and students, and get a very clear sense that Harvard is not right for you. HYP are at a level that no other schools can match in terms of overall opportunities, undergraduate selectivity, diversity, networking, faculty resources, and post-graduate placement (see for example <a href="http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf</a> ). I'm not saying this would necessarily happen to everyone, since there are obviously a great many happy small-LAC alumni, but I know of many, many cases where people loved the idea of small LACs and attended, then found them to be "too small" or "too stifling" and decided to transfer to a larger university after their first year. If for some reason you change your mind down the road, you could always transfer out of Harvard to a small LAC then.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that HYP are basically LACs, just at a slightly larger scale. They are very different from one another, but essentially you will have the opportunities to take smaller classes and seminars at HYP -- perhaps even more than you would if you went to a small-LAC. The reason is because the student-faculty ratios at HYP are in many cases significantly lower than they are at LACs. For example, Yale has over 100 history professors, and Harvard has over 80, whereas a typical LAC has about 10-12. You can do the math given that Yale's incoming class size is only about twice the size of a small-LAC and Harvard's is only about three times larger. </p>
<p>Of course, if it came down to a typical large university versus Amherst, I would almost definitely recommend Amherst because the quality of UG education would be higher there. But HYP are in a class of their own. Not surprisingly, if you look at endowment-per-student, Yale and Princeton are at the top (by a fairly significant margin), with Harvard a close third, and then you have a bunch of small-LACs. Below the top tier LACs are schools like Duke, Northwestern, Brown, Columbia, etc.</p>
<p>"if you havea n interesting idea for a research project or something, i feel like you are more likely to get a faculty helping you with it at amherst than at harvard"</p>
<p>No, I don't think that's true, as long as you are pro-active about seeking out those opportunities at Harvard. Kids who are interested in research at Harvard will find unlimited resources available, whether you're looking for travel money, lab space, mentorship, whatever. I know of undergrads who worked closely with Med School faculty and published their own work before they even graduated. It's the ultimate dream-it-and-do-it place.</p>
<p>"i would still have the opportunity to do something in a large, vibrant city at some point in my life."</p>
<p>Sure, but you can go live in a cozy small-town community later on, too. The question is, what environment will help you make the most of the next four years, when you're young?</p>
<p>"50 percent of them are also in the bottom half of the class, meaning the harvard grad programs are no more realistic."</p>
<p>Of course, but they've already gotten to attend Harvard. No matter where they go to grad school, or if they go to grad school, they will always have that experience.</p>
<p>keep in mind also that harvard grad and harvard undergrad are different experiences</p>
<p>I think it seriously comes down to which places you like better. I'm sure you can find research opportunities and such at either place. You can always live in a big city as an adult. when you wake up in the morning in your dorm room, at which place do you see yourself?</p>
<p>Just to share my biases first - I chose Harvard over Amherst, but my younger brother chose Williams over Harvard (although athletics played a big role in his decision).</p>
<p>As some previous posters have mentioned, it's very possible to have a LAC-like experience at Harvard... if you end up in a small concentration. My friends who are Literature concentrators (~44 concentrators/year) or Classics (~40) end up having dinners at professors' houses, knowing the entire department well, taking tiny classes in their concentration, etc. On the other hand, if you end up in Economics (~750) or Government (~550), you have to be proactive to get to know faculty, advising is impersonal, and things like finding a thesis adviser can be challenging. You can end up studying most broad topics within a smaller concentration (i.e. Social Studies, instead of Gov or Ec), but the variance in concentration intimacy can be a difficulty.</p>
<p>One significant plus I've noticed (compared to my brother at Williams) is that I never have to worry about being shut out of a class -- with the exception of Freshman Seminars (and a few other oddities) classes expand to fit the people who want to take them. On the other hand, he gets lotteried out of things all the time (as a freshman), which he's found frustrating.</p>
<p>Would you miss out extracurricularly if you attended Amherst? I'm not sure what's offered... but at Harvard, the option of writing for The Crimson or The Lampoon, or hosting the Harvard Model UN conference, etc seem pretty difficult to match.</p>
<p>If you go to Harvard undergraduate, you better go to HYP or a top school for the area you study for graduate school. Otherwise it will be seen as going down hill. If you stop at underguate, Harvard may not be the better choice. Very few employers who need to hire only undergraduates will hire from Harvard because you are seen as over qualified and elitist to them. For those who hire from Harvard, will hire a lot of PhDs, so you will be way down in the food chain and will put in some high stress, low reward positions that really don't need college degree at all.</p>
<p>That's horrible advice. From the e-recruiting alone you can see the massive number of employers that love to hire Harvard students as undergrads, and as far as grad schools go it totally depends on what area of grad-work you want to go into (ie, medicine doesn't really matter as long as a you go top-50, business you're not going to be applying straight from undergrad, etc).</p>
<p>Do you even have anything to back up what your saying?</p>
<p>Whether or not it is a horrible or good advice, you will find out when you go to work and be honest to yourself. You are right, I pointed out that too, graduate schools are totaly depends on what area of graduate work, but better be the top one in that area. A lot employers will love to hire Harvard undergrads, but those employers also hires a lot PhDs, MBAs and that is my point. We are talking about a choice between Harvard and Amherst, not Harvards vs some no name school. With today's political and insurance situation, which medical school you will go probably won't matter after all. whether you're going to be applying straight from undergrad for busuness school is beside the point. Reality is my back up. Unfortunately, you only can only realize it when you are facing it.</p>