I am in 11th grade and working on narrowing down my list of colleges. I currently have 5 reach schools on my list and I will likely apply to three of them. They are:
Harvey Mudd
Carnegie Mellon
Northwestern
Rice
Washington University St. Louis
My plan is to earn a computer science degree and although Rice and WashU are excellent schools, I am wondering if the culture of the surrounding area may be a deciding factor. I am from a very liberal state on the west coast and am wondering if anyone could provide some insight into my dilemma (I am having a tough time narrowing my list down to 3). Thanks in advance for your help.
Visited a friend of mine at WUSTL a few years ago and got an impression of a “typical” mid-western town. Also traveled around the state a few times. The STL region and the campus itself is much less “conservative” than the rest of the state. In terns of getting a CS degree (or any engineering major), I’d pick HMC and CMU over the others on your list. Definitely more networking opportunities in SoCal for IT jobs.
St. Louis itself is very blue (just take a look at the 08 and 12 voting maps by county).
And WashU is very blue itself. The student population most certainly leans left. Even the campus republicans are not your typical republicans (for example, they hosted an lgbt friendly panel this year, and co-signed on the petition to NOT have Bristol Palin speak on campus).
HMC and CMU are definitely my top two, so I am currently deciding on my third option. Currently I am leaning towards Rice because the computer science program seems superior to the departments at both WashU and Northwestern…
Houston/Texas is pretty conservative though. UDubb and USC both have good comp sci programs and could be your third option.
@ChaChaanTeng I will be applying to the University of Washington as it is an instate safety for me. However, I am not a fan of the big class sizes in their computer science department.