Northeastern vs. Northwestern

Lol. Sometimes things are more complicated than they need to be!!

@Salutation, you seem earnest enough in this thread and in other threads you have participated in but I have to tell you, you are a little all over the place. If you were going to be playing college basketball at either of these schools, you’d already know it. Maybe this was just an odd choice of words. Both schools I’m sure have a robust intermural program for a variety of sports. Both schools have basketball teams for you to cheer on. Northwestern however has a clearly heavier sports team culture of the two schools.

I hope you are getting solid advice from your school’s guidance department especially because you mentioned somewhere that you are 16 and you also posted a list of schools you were interested in for engineering. It felt like Northeastern got added to the list from a suggestion of someone in CC, Northeastern has a strong engineering program but you don’t seem to really know the school that you’ve applied to. I’m wondering if you pulled the trigger on submitting the application because there isn’t much of an additional essay beyond the common app required? (Or maybe there is now but there wasn’t a few years ago if memory serves.)

In any event, people that choose Northeastern in general want the co op which means they are prepared for the coming and going, summer sessions and the possible social consequences and chaos of that (positive and negative) over a possibly 5 year college education. It’s not your classic 4 year liberal arts type education with summers off in between. Northeastern offers a great urban campus in a fantastic college city which offers all kinds of opportunities for fun and enrichment. It’s easy to get to even from the west coast because it’s close to a major airport with great public transportation. (Stuff you and your family might actually think about trust me.) You will find that most Northeastern students have in general, identified a program within the university that they feel will meet their educational needs. Some do start as undeclared too of course but the opportunities are rich enough for a student to find their path.

Anyway, before you get nervous over things like rankings and what they mean or don’t mean for your future, and in an immediate sense to your college application list I would encourage you to choose your college list with intention vs. out of reaction. This includes not relying too much on what your friends are doing nor what people post here in CC including me. I caution you that so far, you seem to be talking about engineering programs in schools that like Northeastern which are not easy admits even for people with perfect grades, scores and subjectively more compelling ECs, hooks etc.

I’m kind of the perfect person to answer this. I go to Northeastern and chose jr over Northwestern. It’s a school on the rise, highly underrated. I just liked it more, rankings don’t matter if it’s a top level school anyway. Both are top 50 so I didn’t really care.

Northwestern is academically superior and ranked much better than Northeastern. Can’t comment on campus feel (Northeastern is urban, while Northwestern is located in a suburb of Chicago), though they are similar in size. Northwestern’s acceptance rate is about half of Northeastern’s. You can check this link out for more info: http://colleges.startclass.com/compare/1257-1982/Northwestern-University-vs-Northeastern-University