Need Help Choosing: NU, DUKE, CORNELL

<p>“It comes to personal preference at this stage in the game.”</p>

<p>Yeah, for sure Pizzagirl. I know that I’m gonna consider personal preference seriously before making a final decision.</p>

<p>But honestly, when it comes down to personal preference what kind of things should I be on the lookout for?</p>

<p>I mean campus/facilities matter too right? Or maybe not?</p>

<p>I haven’t visited many colleges before so I don’t know what to be on the lookout for when judging a school for personal preference. Any help/suggestion would be appreciated.
And what really matters when considering colleges in terms of personal preference?</p>

<p>I don’t mean to sound snarky, but personal preference is just that - personal preference. The opportunities at these places are all outstanding - so which one do you simply just like better, see yourself at, have facilities that are pleasing to you, have a city / town / surrounding that is interesting to you, have people that seem like “your people” when you meet them? Don’t ask us for your personal preference!</p>

<p>As for the extra 4k/yr, Kellogg cert has 4 courses taught by Kellogg profs; that’s a quarter worth of the Kellogg MBA. Tuition based on 2011-2012 schedule is 18k. You got $2,000 discount there, not to mention the second major in MMSS. ;)</p>

<p>As for Durham vs Chicago/Evanston, there’s simply no comparison. Even Evanston alone trumps Durham. You probably already know that.</p>

<p>To see what some of the popular neighborhoods in Chicago look like, search
Clark and Fullerton, Chicago, IL
on google map and then use street view. Walk north along Clark; it’s a 2-mile stretch of retails and restaurants!! There are many along Halsted and Broadway as well. I like this area even more than any in NYC.</p>

<p><a href=“http://maps.google.com/[/url]”>http://maps.google.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>No, the quality of the “smart” is equal at Duke and NU. What differs are the INTERESTS that the student body has. Because NU has tops-in-the-nation journalism, music and theater, there is a reasonable size chunk of their student body for whom law school never enters their minds. </p>

<p>Someone with poor critical thinking skills would say: Oh, there are 50 Duke kids at Harvard Law and 25 NU kids; clearly the NU kids aren’t as smart.
Someone with better thinking skills realizes that the pool of NU-ers gunning for those schools is smaller simply because there are a lot more interesting things out there in life other than law school, and realizes that they can’t draw any conclusions unless they know the % of people who applied / % who got into any given school or set of schools.</p>

<p>Composition analysis is MEANINGLESS unless it’s related to the composition of the applicants.</p>

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<p>the students, the atmosphere, clubs, the weather, location and surroundings, cost of living, tuition, and any number of things that catch your attention during the visit. obviously, some factors will matter more for you than others, so go visit and see what matter to you. do pay attention to your gut feelings. whether we like it or not, our gut feelings are also based on calculations made by our higher-order thinking skills…they’re just more instantaneous.</p>

<p>Ok, so I really did get into MMSS.
This changes the balance between Duke and Northwestern no?</p>

<p>Just hearing Viviste and others talk about MMSS/Kellogg Cert. really is starting to tip the balance beam towards Northwestern for me.</p>

<p>I mean yeah Duke has intelligent students with great employers but I feel more security with the MMSS program because it sets me on track for where I want to go: either econ grad school/econ research think tanks/govt. or finance/consulting/biz.</p>

<p>Not to mention that Northwestern has the Federal Reserve Challenge team that won 7 years in a row. I am totally interested in this as well.</p>

<p>I dunno… I am getting pretty biased as the date approaches for my visit days to both campuses.</p>

<p>Duke is cheaper for you, so go to Duke.</p>

<p>In my opinion: Northwestern MMSS+FE > Northwestern MMSS only > Duke = Northwestern FE only > Northwestern Econ. only > Cornell Econ. only</p>

<p>MMSS gives you a HUGE boost if you get in, and the financial economics certificate is also a pretty nice boost. Northwestern economics is by itself a great department as well, and is consistently in the top 10 graduate econ departments in the nation (and graduate rankings usually reflect how good the department is for ugrad as well)</p>

<p>The visits are critical, but MMSS > Duke, even for the 16k.</p>

<p>Duke has a finance concentration too within the Economics major. Just because NU has a special certificate that it only allows a certain percentage of the undergrads to attain, that doesn’t mean its recruiting is any stronger. If you’re good enough to get into Northwestern MMSS, you"ll do fantastic during on-campus recruiting at Duke. I know multiple Duke Econ grads my year working for the Federal Reserve and the Consumer Protection Bureau so you can take that route with ease as well as long as you seek out the resources available.</p>

<p>I think the 16K should sway you a little more than any of these special programs within the schools but if you’re indifferent about the money, choose the school that fits you better.</p>

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Someone with even better critical thinking skills would realize that even if you subtract the vocationally focused students at NU, you’d get a student body that’s similar to Duke in size since NU has ~8,500 undergraduates and Duke has ~6,600 undergraduates; therefore, the number of pre-law and pre-med aspirants would be similar since these are both mainstream elite American universities, albeit located in different parts of the country.</p>

<p>To give you an idea of how similar the Arts & Sciences population at Duke and NU are in terms of social tendencies and professional leanings, check this out: <a href=“https://www.aamc.org/download/161114/data/table2-6.pdf[/url]”>https://www.aamc.org/download/161114/data/table2-6.pdf&lt;/a&gt;
Duke had 355 applicants to medical school last year while NU had 302. I don’t have access to the law school data but I imagine there are more applicants from NU actually since Dukies usually go into finance/consulting, medicine, and public service in that order. You"ll find a lot of TFA and Peace Corps folks at both schools.</p>

<p>Besides the University of Chicago which is an outlier, I don’t think interest in the three main professional tracks (business, law, medicine) differs that much amongst the elite schools in the U.S.</p>

<p>Oh and I just read that NU gives 2k per year, renewable to National Merit Finalists.
So… that makes it 8k total which is not at all a big difference considering that NU’s tuition is more expensive.</p>

<p>From what I hear you guys saying NU+MMSS+Kellogg is better than Duke.
But then again the recruiting is similar at both schools and academics well… its kinda hard to say you will get a better “undergraduate” economics education just because NU has a better graduate economics dept.
But… I am considering economics grad school depending on how I fare in the economics/higher math courses so… NU’s world-famous research may have an edge.</p>

<p>Not only that but I heard from my uncle who was an econ major at Penn CAS say that the economics major is one of the most crowded majors at most universities and thus there is more inter-major competition. MMSS+Kellogg will probably help me stand out right?</p>

<p>I guess yeah, arbiter123, the visits will be critical. I’ve never been to Chicago or Durham.</p>

<p>goldenboy8784, I think you put it very well.
I think NU and Duke are too similar in terms of recruiting, grad school, economics to make a final decision based on only those aspects.</p>

<p>I will takes your words into consideration as I go visit the campuses.
I mean 8k is not much of a difference and not a sum for which to sacrifice where I will be happier and enjoy my time studying. Who knows, Duke may be the better personal fit, maybe NU? I won’t know for sure until I visit.</p>

<p>goldenboy,</p>

<p>The fraction of students in specialty schools is close to 1/3. Add the students at our engineering school which does have multiple top-ranked departments (vs Pratt, whose non-BME students are probably there just to leverage Duke for the next gig on WS), then you have half the student body.</p>

<p>The finance concentration is really nothing like graduate-level courses taught by finance professors at one of the best business schools in the world. It seems strange to me that an economics department, supposedly a branch of social science, would offer bunch of undergrad finance and accounting courses for a finance concentration/minor. A econ major with a finance concentration at Duke essentially has most of his upper-level courses in finance and even couple accounting, not economics.</p>

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MMSS would also be part of your undergrad econ education; read the description of the courses and you will see what I mean.</p>

<p>Sam Lee, I am impressed by what you have said about NU’s Kellogg program. I will go see and talk with students in the program myself.</p>

<p>I don’t know much about Duke’s Financial Concentration so that will be a major thing to go find out about at Duke.</p>

<p>I can’t speak about all of these programs in comparison to one another, but others have done a good job with that. I’d just like to throw out a little info in general about Cornell because, for whatever reason, people tend to dismiss it and its location rather outright without having spent time there. I’m not advocating you go there, just trying to give you a more accurate picture.</p>

<p>Generally speaking, I can’t think of more peer institutions than Cornell and Northwestern, with Duke having risen in recent years slightly above both in terms of selectivity and the USNWR way of ranking. I’d say on the East Coast Cornell’s reputation is slightly higher just due to proximity and familiarity due to the fact that there are over 50,000 Cornell alumni in New York City alone and a large number in DC as well.</p>

<p>They have a huge presence in the finance industry with a dedicated Cornell Wall Street program (<a href=“http://www.alumni.cornell.edu/wallstreet/about.cfm[/url]”>http://www.alumni.cornell.edu/wallstreet/about.cfm&lt;/a&gt;). With the new $2 billion tech campus just winning and being built just off Manhattan with classes starting in the fall, Cornell’s long limiting isolation in the business incubation realm may soon be ending as it will have large and integrated network of finance, tech / biotech incubation, and medicine (its medical school has been in Manhattan since the 1800s) all concentrated in the largest city. That might not matter to you as an undergrad, but it could factor significantly into your networking opportunities afterward for your particular field.</p>

<p>As for Ithaca itself, I’ve personally never met anyone who spent 4 years there and regretted it. Especially in your career path, you’ll have your whole life to live in or near major cities (and be able to drink / enter bars and clubs legally in them, which rather limits your ability to engage with them at this stage). Evanston and Durham are much more suburban in nature, whereas Ithaca is in an idyllic setting with huge waterfalls and gorges running through and around town, a unique and independent culture in a city known for its restaurants, and beautiful lakes, wineries, swimming holes, and campus overlooking it all. Given that weather is no worse than you’ll find in Chicago, it just comes down to what you’d prefer when looking at those two schools.</p>

<p>Good luck - can’t go wrong with any of them.</p>

<p>^There is no way the tech campus is opening in the fall, unless I’ve missed an article in the Daily Sun.</p>

<p>The weather is definitely no worse here in Ithaca, but it’s qualitatively different- Chicago will have clear blue skies during winter, and when it rains it rains, when it doesn’t it doesn’t. Here, the sky and the very air are grey and drab for much of the winter and and theres the tendency to “Ithacate” regularly- half raining mist like in the pacific northwest. The description of the natural features is definitely accurate, but NU has it’s own scenic beauty with Lake Michigan and the beachfront along campus. The aethetic on all three campuses is very different though, and depending on your preference you’ll sway one way or another.</p>

<p>^
They’re opening a temporary off-site tech campus in 2012 with the first on-site phase planning to open in 2017. I wasn’t saying one is better than another. I was just trying to describe Ithaca because it was dismissed as a one-horse town where someone could imagine spending a 4 years. That’s not accurate. </p>

<p>As for the sky, it’s pretty much the same as any Northeast weather like Boston or New York City get. Plenty of people handle it just fine, plenty of people don’t like it.</p>

<p>If you want to go to graduate school for economics, I’d go to Northwestern over Duke for Econ undergrad. NU’s econ department is much better than Duke’s on the graduate level, which do reflect the undergraduate level. If you want to go into banking or business, Duke might be better if you do only econ, but if you want a better econ education that will prepare you for grad. school i’d go to NU. Also, if you get into MMSS, you’ll be in one of the top math/econ programs in the nation. The MMSS program gives you a lot more in-depth math analysis that is usually taught in grad. school.</p>