<p>I'm posting this here on the UR forum because there are many knowledgeable people who post here and will be able give me honest advice.</p>
<p>I'm finishing up my freshman year at UR as a CS and econ major. It's been great. I have friends I really like, a relationship, and i've been doing very well in my classes. However, from the moment I stepped on campus, I always felt like academically I had taken a step down from HS and deserved better, so I applied to transfer to some elite schools.</p>
<p>Today I was admitted to transfer Vanderbilt. Can you help me decide if I should go? I would major in CS there, as my econ major here at UR is more of a "because I can" major and not all that related to my life's goals.</p>
<p>Things I like about UR:
Friends - I have some great friends here, and I don't usually make friends easily.
Relationship - same as above.
Weather - believe it or not, I like the cold.
Fit - I'm a geeky guy who doesn't drink, and I think the social scene fits me well here.
Classical music - the scene here is pretty good.
Curriculum - I can easily double degree in CS and econ, and still have time for free electives.</p>
<p>Don't like about UR:
CS outcomes - while some do well and end up at google, many seem to have difficulty getting internships and jobs. Career center is pretty useless compared to most good schools.
Alumni network - pretty lackluster from what I understand
Prestige - yes, this matters to me. UR doesnt have much outside the academic community.
"Meliora" - the motto here may be "ever better" but apathy actually seems to be more accurate among most employees and many students.
General outcomes - the only UR grads who seem to do very well are those who went to elite grad schools.
Student body intelligence - people here are generally smart enough, but I wish I had more competition. At Vanderbilt I would be among intellectual equals.</p>
<p>Things that make me nervous about Vanderbilt:
the social scene - I don't drink and I hate parties. Vanderbilt has a reputation for being the opposite of what I want in a social scene.
CS reputation - UR's CS department actually seems to be a little better than Vandy's in terms of academic reputation.
Curriculum - I will lose all my freedom and have to drop my econ degree.</p>
<p>Main reasons to go to Vanderbilt:
Prestige
Reputation with employers, general public
Incredibly smart, talented student body
Career center and on campus recruiting
Alumni network
I feel like i'm selling myself short by going to UR.</p>
<p>In my experience, people look at elsewhere and imagine it is different when the issues are really not so much where you are but who you are. You are imagining Vanderbilt as a “thing” that it is not. You will not find yourself suddenly among “intellectual equals” and employers don’t in any way care about some difference between the schools, if any exists. Those ideas are silly, though maybe an employer in Tennessee might care, the same as a Rutgers degree is worth more in NJ. If you actually get into the Vandy career center, I’ll bet you’ll find fault with it too. </p>
<p>I’ll be blunt: the reasons you cite are kind of dumb. They indicate to me you are unsettled and have some other form of unhappiness in you. It makes no difference to me if you stay at UR or go, but I would ask myself where the sources of unhappiness really lie. It’s not abnormal to have happiness issues at your age. It is, in fact, extremely normal. You may want to look at your family and think about what forms of unhappiness you may see there to consider how you may be enacting traits within you. Then you can make a better decision about what you need as a person, not some simplified notions about career centers. Maybe you should talk to a relative - whomever you feel close to - so you can understand what others in your family have gone through. It helps to recognize the traits that inhabit your head and, ideally, how people in your family have dealt with them successfully. Note I’m saying this is normal: every family has traits and every person has to deal with happiness issues in the context of those traits.</p>
<p>I cannot speak about your respective departments at both U of R as compared to Vanderbilt although U or R is and has always been nationally recognized for their Economics Dept. I am the parent of a Rochester alum. One of her lifelong best friends is a Vanderbilt alum. She is presently graduating from law school and I do not know what her undergrad major was. I do know that she felt that law school was the first time in her life that she was truly challenged academically. She felt that Vanderbilt was more similar to high school, she did not feel intellectually challenged, she hated the heavy frat/drinking culture and couldn’t wait until she got out of there. Everyone’s experience at college is different and for most students everywhere freshman year is quite different than sophomore year, where you can get more into your major, develop more of a relationship with the professors in your department as well as juniors and seniors, prepare for possible study abroad and so on. I think the question of prestige is somewhat of a myth as prestige is primarily important for grad school in terms of your major but that is somewhat irrelevant. What gets you into grad school as well as internships is the networking and word of mouth from the faculty in your department as well as your overall GPA and GRE if you are in a field where GRE is a requirement.</p>
<p>I have a somewhat different take, maybe partly because I am in the adjustment phase of my kid just deciding to attend UR, and that means cutting ties with some other very desirable choices. You are getting at something I have tried to get at in understanding UR and where it sits reputation-wise. It’s not a household name for everyone (yet). Even in New England, I know some will expect to hear my kid is going somewhere like Columbia when she and we say “Rochester.” So I think I understand a bit of where you’re coming from.</p>
<p>But then there is the other side. I can’t think of one thing I don’t like about UR. I’m not seriously in love with it (and don’t think my kid is either) but she/I really, really like almost everything about it and struggle to come up with any negatives at all (save some vague thing about the oft-mentioned weather). I think some us with any shallow leanings do have to deal with the ego issue in dealing with Rochester. It’s not a sexy name. But it’s a great school, and I know my kid is going to thrive and do well.</p>
<p>UR sounds like it is doing very well by you. By your own description you are doing better than ever with a better social life than ever. Everyone agrees that UR is academically strong and so with your social life going so well, why in the world would you want to change??? You have hit a home run and don’t even know it! Vandy may be more “prestigious” in some sense with a higher ranking and all of that, but I seriously doubt the kids are noticeably or really brighter. And there is a chance you would be VERY unhappy there, unless you have some experience with the South that is positive and you can picture yourself in a pretty Greek setting where physical attractiveness and some other superficial things may be valued more highly than UR and than what you will be comfortable with.</p>
<p>My advice is get over the ego issue, realize that you’re getting a superb education, and appreciate what sounds like huge improvement in your social life fortunes. And this is where I agree with Lergnom…you shouldn’t still be struggling with this 8 months into your frosh year. Your opportunities to succeed will be there. Take them.</p>
<p>BTW, I’m tempted not to soothe the ego issues, but…UR IMHO is a tremendous school with an already very strong reputation that is still very much on the rise. The admit rate is trending down. Apps are at all-time highs. And the “word” about UR is getting out there. I noticed this year how often very high level kids were regularly including UR in the mix of schools to apply to along with the Vandys, Wash Us, Michigans, MITs, NYU, top LACs, etc. UR is no joke and my sense is a lot of folks out there are catching on.</p>
<p>“I’m finishing up my freshman year at UR as a CS and econ major. It’s been great. I have friends I really like, a relationship, and i’ve been doing very well in my classes.”</p>
<p>These are your words. Read them. No parent or kid could hope for much more. Like I said, you’ve hit a home run and think you’ve just struck out. That is reason to look internally instead of grasping at straws externally. And here I am on the same page with Lergnom again. This is a tremendous opportunity to really gain some insight into yourself and grow as a person. Use the counseling center. You’re paying for it (which is exactly what I would tell my kids).</p>
<p>URoch is also very well known in the physics and optics community. DH worked in the academic optical physics field for many years. Everyone in that field has heard of UR; many of them are UR grads.</p>
<p>And let me relate a story. D2 is a backpacker and avid hiker. A couple of summers ago she and a friend from high school (who went to UC-Davis) hiked the entire length of the John Muir Trail (Sierra Nevadas of CA fromYosemite to Mt Whitney). Along the trail she met tons of people–including a couple of students from UNC-CH, a father-son pair from San Francisco, an Israeli ex-soldier, several grad students from Berkeley (including some in CS), a group of software/hardwareware engineers from Silicon Valley. And ALL of them immediately knew the University of Rochester when they asked where D2 was a student. </p>
<p>D2 was surprised that all of these diverse individuals not knew about UR, but had a very positive perception of it.</p>
<p>So it’s not like UR is completely unknown outside of upstate NY. People do know about it.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the feedback everyone. What you are saying does make sense. However, two things just keep sticking out in my head.</p>
<p>Class of 2017 acceptance rates
UR: 31.06%
Vanderbilt: 11.97%
Sure, UR is slowly on the rise with potential to be a top-25 school in the next decade. But Vanderbilt has the potential to be in the top 10.</p>
<p>Mid-career salaries (according to payscale)
UR: $88,800
Vanderbilt: $104,000 (note that since Vanderbilt only got super selective in the past few years, meaning that current students are on average higher-achieving, this is probably lower than is deserved).</p>
<p>I think I will stay at UR though. I will not do well anywhere if i’m not satisfied socially, and it seems there is a high probability that I would not be satisfied at Vanderbilt as I am at UR.</p>
<p>Last points on concern that keeps gnawing at you.</p>
<p>The bubble on this whole selectivity thing is going to burst sometime soon. The same 20-25,000 kids are all applying to the same schools and knocking each other out. </p>
<p>Vandy cannot really move up because who is it going to knock down? I think UR will move up some, but again, you start pushing into competitors that are very hard to nudge down. UR is high enough and well-established enough that you shouldn’t have to apologize for anything. You can’t let a magazine determine how you see yourself (and many of us have to remind ourselves of that).</p>
<p>Your concern is not unusual. This whole CC site reeks of your concern and feeds it. What is unhealthy is that you are still preoccupied with the concern a full year since you made your decision (especially since you are thriving).</p>
<p>Among people who know “good” schools, as opposed to “popular” schools, UR is well known. Your physician, surgeon, dentist, opthamologists, etc. all know of UR and may have spent time there. Talk to physicsts, esp. those in optics, they know UR. Professional musicians know UR. D is a UR alumnus, almost has her MLS degree–she meets UR people all over her profession.</p>
<p>Those who look down their noses at UR, think it’s a SUNY, are simply showing their ignorance.</p>
<p>URHopeful - It does sound like you are happy in most ways at UR, and I think Vanderbilt definitely has a very different social vibe. If your classes haven’t been hard enough for your freshman year you can probably change that next year. Did you just take 4 courses second semester? Were you mostly in introductory courses? Are you taking the honors level of your courses? Have you reached out to profs to ask for extra work or research opportunities? You’ll naturally be in higher level courses next year, but consider taking honors level courses and/or taking 5 classes. And really - go talk to your profs. My freshman has been meeting with a prof once a week in his intended major to get some guidance with some self studying he’s doing. It really is true that UR tends to get out of the way of any student trying to go faster, busier, etc., and in fact help them find extra things to do. Just curious - what econ and comp sci classes did you take?</p>
<p>I read your second post - #9 - and I shook my head. If you’re in computer science, I would expect you to look into metrics and to judge their quality - both in terms of data integrity and how well they measure. </p>
<p>So for example, name me competitive schools in the South to Vanderbilt. Kind of a short list. Now name competitive schools in the Northeast or the Midwest. The list is long. You can expand the lists to include the central part - to pick up WashU to compare to Vanderbilt, though I don’t see them drawing the same application base. You can manipulate that all you want. Now tell me how many students apply in the South. You can estimate from the percentage of Southerners listed as enrolled. But you can use as a proxy the absolute number of applicants. How many? Over 28k. That means lots of kids in the South are applying to Vanderbilt because it is on that short list of quality schools in the region, a list that is even shorter if you want a research university and is even shorter still if you have no chance of getting into Duke. You make the elementary mistake of not evaluating the data. This is, btw, what I call the NYU misconception: consider the number of people in the NY MSA and then marvel at what it would take to not have way more applicants to NYU than they can admit. Think about that sentence. The MSA has 20 million people. If NYU didn’t generate a ton of applicants, given its size and place in Manhattan and given its grad schools, then something would be very, very wrong. </p>
<p>So I would expect lots of applications to Vanderbilt, fewer to Rochester and more competition for those admitted to Rochester just because it is in a region with much more competition. I would add that I don’t know the kind of applicant who applies to Rochester but given its location maybe, just maybe the applicant spectrum is not as broad, meaning fewer people apply to UR on a flyer and more people apply for a specific set of reasons. I’d bet lots of Southerners take a flyer on getting into Vandy.</p>
<p>Now I’m going to get tough on you. In capital letters: DID YOU CLICK THROUGH ON PAYSCALE? When I clicked through on the school reports I saw something kind of obvious: the Vanderbilt report lists something different. What might that be? It’s an occupation, a specific occupation which reports a much higher salary. What is that? It’s President. Making 200k a year. Kind of drives up the average. So your data quality is garbage and you could have checked it by clicking on a link.</p>
<p>Now notice the data doesn’t even relate to what you are saying, meaning the metric doesn’t measure. What is listed under Rochester: some engineers, a manager, a teacher. What is listed under Vanderbilt other than President: nurse practitioners of various kinds. Are you a nurse practitioner? I assume that is not your career goal so tell me why this information has more than 0 relevance. </p>
<p>My point here is to beat on you: sloppy work deserves to be whacked. Unhappiness is a different matter. If you are unhappy and looking for reasons to justify that, then you find reasons. They don’t have to make sense. As I’ve just discussed, if you look at them, they very well may mean nothing at all. But you can find them. Don’t fault yourself for looking around or for looking for reasons. Then beat yourself up for 10 seconds for being sloppy about it and move on. Lots of people are unhappy. Lots of people are always unhappy, which is too bad. Most people go through periods of unhappiness. I’d say nearly all people experience this and I question the honesty of those who say they don’t.</p>
<p>^^^^But the kicker is that URHopeful says he/she is happy, indeed sounds like happier than ever!</p>
<p>Lergnom makes a great point about regionalism. Look at how many elite LACs are in the Northeast and Midwest. In the South there is only Davidson and Washington and Lee (the latter of which generally attracts an even more limited clientele).</p>
<p>I hope it was clear I was trying to make 2 points for this person. </p>
<ol>
<li>It’s normal to be unhappy. </li>
<li>It’s normal to seize on things that feed your unhappiness. </li>
</ol>
<p>Understanding that “selectivity” is driven by application numbers, meaning the denominator of admissions / applications, doesn’t change these two points. Usually unhappiness passes. Sometimes it means more is going on. The first is what every single human being experiences.</p>
<p>Yes, except that he did not describe being unhappy…very much the contrary. Suggesting to him he’s unhappy when he believes he is happy seems like a tricky place to go. Indeed, this person describes being as happy as one could expect in a first year of college, and that’s where I think the error is being made. It’s an ego/narcissistic crisis rather than a depression crisis. And frankly what to do if it was the latter can be a little more complicated.</p>
<p>I had posted but deleted it but I want to bring up one point I had written about. Your success in Computer science is all about what you do to be successful. That means you must have a go get them attitude to get internships and the grades that make you stand out, no matter where you go to school. It is all about you.</p>
<p>I lived in Silicon Valley for many years and no one took notes where a person went to school. They only cared whether the product the company was claiming to make seem innovative enough to invest in. </p>
<p>You want success? Learn how to present yourself and your ideas to those who will pay you money to do them. You need to be aggressive and communicate cleanly and convincingly. You need to take classes in business and entrepreneurialism, not just CS and econ. </p>
<p>Thousands of student do just this at lesser schools than UR and don’t complain that their school was not prestigious enough.</p>
<p>Another word about intellectual rigor of classes. When you are an entering freshman, it is very difficult to know what to expect when you register for classes as too a certain extent it is the luck of the draw. To try to place out of freshman writing or not? Would it be better to take it and hope that it is an easy A… sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you unfortunately end up with a freshman year class in which that section was randomly selected because it was the best for your schedule and it is the “easy A” and the work is not challenging (my experience in the dark ages in the first subject class in my future major). Sometimes you register for a class and every upperclassmen you meet says the hardest class I have taken and studied so hard to stretch to get a B or a B minus which was my d’s experience first semester in a psych cluster class… the professor now only teaches graduate students, older d had a similar experience at another college for honors freshman chem which was a selective admit to begin with -you had to sit for an exam as well as have a minimum of 4 on your AP to even sit for the exam (yes that was the last year that professor ever taught an undergraduate class). </p>
<p>Not your major but if you are looking for rigor, I recommend taking two years of music history and two years of music theory at Rochester…</p>
<p>I don’t want to judge the quality of a person’s unhappiness. It’s not uncommon for people to be happy and unhappy at the same time. Disatisfaction, for example, is a trait I see in my family. It’s something I have to be aware of.</p>
<p>My 2 cents about school and life. What matters over time is you. You can scrounge your way through a program at night and end up running a big company. Not a common result compared to Yale but when you correct for monetary starting point in life - meaning you take out the rich kids - then my bet is success starts to look pretty random. </p>
<p>Lots of schools these days, with more uncertainty in the air, are marketing themselves as a surer path. That’s nonsense. It all depends on you, your ability and your ambition. </p>
<p>And to repeat a point made fairly often on this board, jobs pay what they pay in the locations they’re in. If you are a mech engineer in Kansas City, you’ll make what mech engineers in KC make not more because you have x degree. If you make more, it’s because you’re better at the job and rank higher. We’ve often had this discussion here in relation to debt loads students and families consider: the main determinant of what you make is your profession and location, not the school name on your undergrad diploma.</p>
<p>I’m a Vanderbilt alum and a computer scientist, and I’ve worked for a couple of the best technology companies in the world, hired a lot of people, and so on…</p>
<p>My advice is simple: stay at UR where you are happy, have a fantastic time there - you only get to be an undergrad once - and knock it out of the park in your CS studies. Then, go to a great grad school in Silicon Valley or Boston or the NYC area or Austin or Seattle or SoCal, etc. and get your MS/ME in CS or CompEng. You can make the contacts you need at grad school and, if prestige is still critical for you, an MS from Stanford or Yale looks pretty good on the ole resume ;). And even if those sorts of schools are out of reach, there are many great CS grad schools well respected in our industry - UW, UT, many of the UCs, etc. etc. Most of these schools offer terminal (professional) Masters degrees in CS or EECS.</p>
<p>That said, I loved Vandy; congrats on getting in. Good luck with your decision.</p>