<p>Great news, Blur. If you need any more help, there are plenty of us on this site that will help any way we can. Best of luck!</p>
<p>Hello again! Just one last question before I apply. I know that this is off topic for this thread, but I am quite worried about how my grades will look to the ad com. My school follows the UK system, where we take the cambridge O-level and A-level. For application purposes, I will be sending in my O level grades, preliminary exam grades, and A-level projected grades. I am a straight A student except for a C for physics for my preliminary exam due to grade deflation in my school. My predicted grades are still straight As. Do you think it will hurt much, considering that a C in the US system is considered a pretty low grade?</p>
<p>I wqouldn't lose any sleep over the C grade. Smith ad coms are pretty savvy folks and will take everything into consideration. ;)</p>
<p>Thanks BJM8! Off to school for me now..when all of you all will be going to bed soon.lol..</p>
<p>Not to be a wet-blanket, but Wellesley's and Smith's famous graduates such as M. Albright and Hillary Clinton, and Friedan, Regan, Bush, Plath all graduated before they had the option of attending many of our other prestigious schools. Williams and Dartmouth first accepted women in 1968 (for the class of '72), Princeton and Yale in 1969, and Harvard did not integrate Radcliff until 1970.</p>
<p>Tammy Baldwin was class of '84. Try a little experiment: find a current female member of Congress who graduated from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown, Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore (which had been co-ed the whole time, so what's their excuse?). (Hint: there is one, but you'll have to spend a long time looking.) </p>
<p>I can't speak for the other schools, but I can tell you that whether you choose the arts, sciences, politics, or whatever, the achievement of women that have graduated from my alma mater (Williams) has been decidedly underwhelming. Same holds true for recent female winners of prestigious graduate fellowships. </p>
<p>We can all speculate why that is. Clearly, one would think that, with better average higher SAT scores and greater selectivity, all of this schools should be doing MUCH better than Smith. Or at least as well. T</p>
<p>But they're not (and when it comes to female Fulbrights, there isn't a school in the country that is even close.) The underperformance of the coed schools relative to Smith (and Wellesley) is rather striking.</p>
<p>This is a very interesting debate. The fact that the female undergraduates of highly prestigious and highly selective coed schools such as the ones mentioned in mini's post above don't achieve the way one would expect is curious. On the other hand, it is true that virtually every one of the truly big-name Seven Sisters alumnae that pop instantly into one's head graduated a very long time ago-- i.e., pre-coeducation (Steinem, H. Clinton, Albright, Streep, Stewart); in fact, many of them are dead (Chiang Kai-shek, Child, Plath, Freidan, Hepburn, Grasso, Wasserstein). The oldest of the post-coeducation SS alumnae are old enough at this point to have made their mark but no names spring to mind (I don't put Tammy Baldwin in the same category as those listed above, at least not yet).</p>
<p>An interesting way of addressing this question would be to draw up a list of the 100 or 200 most powerful/influential/successful/high-achieving women in the US, from all sectors combined (politics, business, higher education, the arts, science, etc.), without any regard for where they went to college. Then divide the list into two sub-lists: women over 55 (i.e., graduated from college circa 1973 or before) and women under 55 (graduated from college post-1973). Then go through and see who went where and how the percentages compare.</p>
<p>My guess is that such an exercise would show that on both sub-lists the alumnae of womens colleges overacheive and the alumnae of highly prestigious coed schools don't achieve nearly the way they might be expected to. Someting else it might show is that alumnae of the less prestigious women colleges (non-Seven Sisters) do, as a group, surprisingly well (aren't there several members of Congress who are graduates of lesser-known Catholic womens colleges?). </p>
<p>Perhaps we would also be surprised to see how many of them went to fairly low-prestige institutions in general, whether coed or single-sex. Then you'd have to look into whether the undergraduate prestige factor plays out differently among women than among men, etc. Interesting stuff.</p>