<p>Employers don’t forget the rankings, though. Why not give oneself the most prestigious school possible on a resume? Why deprive oneself of that kind of competitive advantage?</p>
<p>Everyone from Rice should get a job, just as everyone from Harvard should get a job (if not multiple jobs from either place), but the working world isn’t easy, and careers have all sorts of train wrecks, and so I think that it’s important to have a diploma from the best school possible. (Rice is an excellent school, but HYP have the edge in overall prestige and name recognition.) </p>
<p>Considering how hard I’ve had it in my career even with my Harvard degree, I can only fathom how much worse things would have been if I had degrees from places of the caliber of my undergrad school, which was a top-10 LAC.</p>
<p>Elanorci,
Thank you for your post. I don’t have enough posts for PMs, but wanted to say it was helpful to hear. I want to go into engineering and am not interested in banking or politics. I do not feel ready to make this decision, but due to athletic recruiting deadlines, I have to anyway. Rice offer was very generous; ivy would be doable, but somewhat stressful for my family (siblings to put through college as well). I was struck by the camaraderie and sense of fun the other students had when I visited Rice. Things felt uptight and tense when I spent the 48 hours visiting the ivy. Could always go east for grad school (to experience a part of the country other than Texas and when I’d feel more comfortable being so far from home) with a Rice engineering degree, right? Thanks again.</p>
<p>I’m glad to have helped! You can definitely always move east for grad school. It’s definitely hard to have to make this decision now, but it sounds to me like you have really good reasons for choosing Rice, and I am very confident that you’ll be happy there. </p>
<p>@SoCalDad2, I have the same question? When DS went to his overnight at Rice he stayed in one of the res colleges. His res college that night had a dodgeball game against another res college, and one of the students who came along for the game was a pitcher on the Rice baseball team. Now DS was not very happy when the pitcher switched to the other side to even the teams out (playing dodgeball against a Div1 pitcher would not be appealing), but point is that the pitcher lived in the res college with the rest of the students.</p>