<p>CC messed up my account. I don’t think they can fixed it.</p>
<p>liberationn15, I made an account on this site just so I could post about your question. You see, I went to Creighton University for one year before transferring out to the University of Chicago. You may think that means I hated it there and want to persuade you to go elsewhere, but I have both good and bad things to say about it and want you to have all the information.</p>
<p>First and foremost, Creighton is a huge pre-medical school. As you take biology and chemistry classes, expect a lot of your problems sets to come from photocopied practice MCATs. Creighton is excellent for pre-medical students as they really want them to succeed, and almost everyone who is pre-med at Creighton will find a medical school after they graduate; this is one of the reasons I attended Creighton in the first place. But after I found out I wanted to go into basic science, I found Creighton’s resources lacking. I joined a lab, but I have to say student research is not as common place or as well integrated into your life as clinical volunteer work. I felt somewhat ignored (most PIs didn’t want undergrads) and under-utilized (no one wanted to teach an undergrad any bench techniques). </p>
<p>Now, I was part of the honors program, so I sort of had VIP status for getting into labs and classes, but I still felt the research experience there is not that strong. Are you in to their honors program? Although it didn’t work out for me, a lot of my friends found it necessary to have the freedom to ignore the core and focus on pre-med/research activities. If you are not a part of that program, I don’t think I could recommend Creighton.</p>
<p>As a side note, (before I go into all the good things about the place) I also was overwhelmed by the religious presence on campus. I’m sure you know it’s a Jesuit school. When I was there they brought in speakers for campus events who would talk about how gay people can pray their way to becoming straight. Condoms are not readily available technically (it’s in the rule book) you aren’t allowed to have sex in the dorms if you aren’t married. Obviously this isn’t well enforced, but members of the opposite sex will be forced from your floor at a certain time at night, and some days they have bag checks at the door of dorms to make sure you’re not carrying any contra-band. I found this invasion of privacy stacked on top of my research problems to be too much, so I left.</p>
<p>At Chicago, the research was a totally different experience. Many PIs were willing to train me, and I joined a high profile project with a well known PI, and I know (Because my GREs were terrible) his letter along with another well known professor got me into WashU DBBS for grad school. Furthermore, I feel like I need less training because of all the techniques I was exposed to and all of the independent experiments I had to design. Instead of practice MCATs, our assignments for class included reading and analyzing primary literature every week (happened rarely at Creighton). Also, the student body is very different. Instead of drinking dominating the weekend, people host debates or theatre clubs or just hang out at the library and coffee shops. All in all, I am glad I took on 65k debt for this experience; I wouldn’t trade it for the world.</p>
<p>Now, Creighton has some great points you need to consider as well: the classes are pretty small and most professors will go out of their way to learn your name and make sure you do well. Furthermore, their chemistry program rocks. One of my friends from Creighton just got accepted to UChicago for a chem PhD, so they do position their students very well. The smaller campus also meant there was a stronger focus on the undergraduate students, whereas at Chicago some of my professors required you to be proactive in order to chat with. Also, the honors program helps if you have that, and the scholarship you mentioned is phenomenon (congratulations!) Also, there is the big fish in the small pond phenomenon. If you do well at Creighton, chances are decent you could win a goldwater fellowship or something similar, whereas at Chicago I was easily outpaced by people smarter than me.</p>
<p>Overall, I guess I feel that Creighton is a great school, but was obviously a bad fit for me. If you want a direct answer, I would say this: so long as you make use of your opportunities you can probably get into any graduate school in the country, but make sure you understand the environment is very different from a research university. Creighton is a fine school, and if my own children wanted to go there I would say more power to them, but I know that for me, if I hadn’t transferred to a research university (assuming similar GPA and GRE scores and continued work in that lab I was in while at Creighton) I wouldn’t have such great graduate school opportunities. </p>
<p>So maybe the moral of the story is, if you go to Creighton…ace your GREs? I’m not sure. I’m sorry this post has been so long and a little disorganized, but I wanted to tell you all that. If you have any specific questions, please feel free to ask. It’s important you find a school which is good for you. And just to be clear, I’m not saying you should go to WashU; University of Nebraska is a great school with plenty of labs, though a little more impersonal than Creighton. </p>
<p>Good luck!!</p>
<p>Pilsung – I sent you a PM! Thank you so much for your insights! (=</p>
<p>I, too, went to Creighton as an undergraduate. I knew the main focus of the university was geared towards pre-med students, but I was interested in a career in law and/or the performing arts. I didn’t like any of the LACs I visited, and I didn’t want to attend a large university. I chose Creighton because I liked the Political Science and Theatre faculties, and in Nebraska/Iowa/South Dakota it is considered to be quality institution. Does prestige matter? Yes and no. Yes, doing well at an institution whose name is immediately recognizable may provide a few more opportunities in some situations. However, for admission to graduate school, I found my Creighton experience to be more than adequate. I went to a top twenty law school on a full-merit scholarship. Further, I am currently in one of the top Ph.D. programs for theatre & drama in the country (Many of my fellow graduate students are from the Ivy League or top LACs). My best friend just earned a Ph.D. in Logic, Language, and Computation at the University of Amsterdam, and he graduated from Iowa State University–not exactly the most prestigious undergraduate institution. I agree with several of the posters here that your GPA and GRE score will matter most. Creighton students are generally hard working, kind, and thoughtful. Some will go on to the top graduate programs in the U.S., but you will have to work hard to get there. I would visit with the faculty in your major and ask where RECENT graduates have gone to graduate school. What kind of grades did they receive? How common was this type of placement? You want to be assured that the people there can provide you with the education and guidance you require. When I visited Creighton, their current top students in Political Science were going to Stanford Law, Michigan Law, and Indiana University for Graduate School in Political Science. This meant that success after Creighton was attainable. Also, if the department has a contact list of recent graduates that would be helpful, too. Once you have this information, I think you can make an informed decision. For my part, I loved my Creighton experience.</p>
<p>^ Iowactor, what year did you graduate?</p>
<p>liberationn15, I graduated in 2002. So long ago, right?!</p>
<p>As my professor put it to me when I asked about this, it does matter to a certain extent. The admissions committee wants to be able to gauge the quality of the education you received in order to situate your profile in their minds and see if you are a good fit for their school. They can only do this with schools they have heard of and are familiar with the prestige of the program you came from. I was told that if they have never heard of the school you came from (which is unlikely since they have been at this a long time) or they know the quality of your undergraduate is low, it may hurt your chances. I guess it makes sense intuitively because if they know that students from school X don’t usually get a very good education and come from a bad program then they likely wouldn’t do well in grad school. I’m not sure how often this really happens but I think it happens more along the lines of “This program is better than that one.” So I think it does matter, but probably not as much as other factors.
I sort of worried about this in the other direction because I come from a top 40 LAC that deflates grades a lot and I was hoping that the adcoms would recognize the name and understand why my GPA wasn’t as good as it could have been… and I guess they did.</p>
<p>daybyday is wrong about Mathematical Logic being offered under a philosophy department. I don’t know how much Logic Nebraska offers, but I’m sure you could do the Budapest Semester in Mathematics (which offers Logic) and find someone in the department that can help you do an independent study or research in Logic. Also, there are a good amount of Logic REUs, although many are very competitive. If you want to do graduate school in Logic, I would recommend looking into UCLA’s Logic Center, UC Berkeley’s Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science, UIUC and CMU’s Logic Research, etc. The “top 10” might give you a good idea of who specializes in it: [Logic</a> - Math - Graduate Schools - Education - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-mathematics-programs/logic]Logic”>http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-mathematics-programs/logic)</p>
<p>Nebraska will also give you an opportunity to take lots of graduate courses and have a competitive application, should you choose to go to graduate school in math. I would definitely recommend taking the scholarship. You will not be held back at Nebraska, and keep in mind that colleges look at an entire student’s application, not just their school. And if you’re going to grad school for math, you won’t be getting rich any time soon, so the last thing you want to do is take out a ton of student loans to go to WashU that you’ll have a really tough time paying back.</p>