<p>Thank You BrownParent!</p>
<p>I am OOS for all the shortlisted unis</p>
<p>Location does not matter much to me, if at all.</p>
<p>I have already stated my personal preferences which are weighed heavily by the quality of teaching, quality of education, quality of academics, provision of special opportunities to undergraduates and how intellectual the environments and students are!</p>
<p>Any other responses anyone?</p>
<p>Thank You! :)</p>
<p>most of your criteria are hard to evaluate: they’re all large universities focused on research, so unless you get into the Honors College, quality of teaching for your first two years will be related to TAs and those are rather unpredictable in skill. If quality of teaching and academic environments are your primary criteria, I’d focus on the criteria to get into the Honors College and rank them according to how likely to are you get into it and how well-designed the Honors College is.
I’d only keep Pitt if you’re interested in the sciences and if you want an urban environment since outside its honors program it’s lower in its freshman selectivity. Penn State and Maryland College Park are similar, with Penn State having the edge academically but Maryland leading for some engineering specialties such as ChemE. UMinnesota Twin Cities offers an urban environment in a GREAT city, but it’s also very cold and very, very large. Penn State has a self-contained campus in a college town, so it’s less overwhelming and more student-focused, but cities such as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are 4 hours away (5-6 hours for NYC and DC). tOSu is less academically challenging thant the previous ones but its football team is awesome (as well as the band) and it’s in a town in between the size of Pittsburgh and State college if you want medium-sized.</p>
<p>Are these the universities you got into or the universities you are thinking about for next year?</p>