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<p>I’m from Ohio too!</p>
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<p>I do admit I know little about OSU; I do know UIUC mentioned above is a fantastic place to study, though. </p>
<p>Yeah, my post was mainly for the OP’s clarification - you’ve posted time and again before that a fit with the environment is crucial :)</p>
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<p>Definitely, you’re right there! Probably by an bigger margin than would be immediately apparent, considering how bad I am at anything lab-related, and considering I’m hoping I never have to use anything but a pen and paper forever.</p>
<p>I add my personal experience here because I was once very attracted by the prospects of very high-workload schools, and very well might have made a choice that’s bad for me when in high school. When I exited high school, all I was thinking was that my interest in mathematics, the sciences, etc was greater than that of most people of my high school, and the “most hardcore school” appealed. Honestly, I think MIT is actually better off in this regard than some other schools, because I think it offers a bit more of a choice as to how much students must pile on, although the coursework is undoubtedly hard. The environment probably makes it hard not to pile stuff on too.</p>
<p>Since the OP mentioned MIT graduate school, I also should note that my experience observing graduate admissions results in various years has confirmed that people come from a lot of different good schools. Sure, I’m sure a lot of Ivy Leagues are pretty well represented, but it’s really not uncommon for a lot of the students at good programs coming from diverse backgrounds. After all, that’s a whole 4 years later, and suddenly people realize what they want to do.</p>
<p>One nice thing is that even if your undergrad school doesn’t have the absolute top programs in whatever you want to specialize in, the professors at that school are likely to be tippy top themselves. They’re probably brilliant, a fair share of them hugely in demand, etc. This is simply because of how astronomically difficult it is to even land faculty positions at those places - anywhere in the top 25 (and that’s going conservative) for a field is bound to be crowded with people who got PhDs and postdocs at top universities, and whose research is very impressive. It makes it so that what the undergrad does will nearly never be limited.</p>
<p>That said, schools like MIT, Harvard, etc are bound to be especially successful at sending undergrads to great places, because they have great resources, but more importantly, their students are already very motivated, and probably motivated each other (like Mollie was hinting) through the years.</p>
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<p>I did not know there was a significant difference. I thought it depended on the departments. As in-state, S is pretty much guaranteed acceptance to both (with class rank & NMSF). Although, locally it seems Aggies get the highest paying jobs. Atleast, this is what a recruiter from Honeywell was telling me a couple of weeks ago.</p>
<p>Transferring from a less reputed university to unv like MIT is easier than from a highly reputed unv ? :O</p>
<p>Just wanted to throw in a comment that a strong student is not <em>doomed</em> by attending a large public research university. I work at a university not that different from Ohio State. In the physical sciences, our graduates have had no difficulty in gaining admission to the universities/groups where they’d like to pursue a Ph.D. The situation might be different in the biological sciences, though.</p>
<p>Both the University of Texas, Austin and Texas A&M are AAU institutions–a consortium of leading, research intensive universities. In the physical sciences, neither would be limiting in any way.</p>
<p>^ My guess would be that it depends both on the repute of your department in the given field and the nature of the field. A field that is extremely lab-centric may require more in the way of resources, both to maintain the best ones and to offer paid positions to undergraduates. This is one place where I think there is probably an advantage at the well-recognized, well-endowed schools. </p>
<p>When it comes to pen and paper work, like I said, I think the faculty at schools other than the so-called “top few” are usually so accomplished that the students will have no trouble finding interesting academic activities to bask in.</p>
<p>The physical sciences tend to be pretty lab-centric also (though my own branch is theoretical). In general, a research-intensive university will offer the resources needed. </p>
<p>I can’t write knowledgeably about biology, though. If it is different, I suspect that might be a result of the “culture” of the field, rather than the adequacy of the resources.</p>
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<p>It does depend on departments, but I think UT-Austin’s departments are stronger in general than Texas A & M. I admittedly don’t know that much about Texas A & M, so if I’m wrong about your son’s chosen field of study, then disregard my post. However, your son may switch from one technical major to another, so picking a school which is strong in several technical areas is important.</p>
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<p>I would hope not. S would be attending Cypress Ridge High school if we had not moved him to a new district after middle school to what we considered an academically more rigours and challenging high school. Today, S would probably have a perfect GPA and rank number one at that high school, considering that there is not a single National merit finalist and just three commended scholars at Cy Ridge High:</p>
<p>[High</a> school scholars saluted for academic performance | Ultimate Cy-Fair](<a href=“http://www.ultimatecyfair.com/stories/232955-high-school-scholars-saluted-for-academic-performance]High”>http://www.ultimatecyfair.com/stories/232955-high-school-scholars-saluted-for-academic-performance)</p>
<p>Contrast that with the fact that S is well on track to be a Finalist not just in TX, but any State in the country. </p>
<p>At the school he is attending presently, there are about a dozen finalists and two times that many commended scholars each year. So, As are harder to get here than at Cy Ridge. However, I would rather my son experience the pain of Bs now and be rejected by MIT, than get to a school like MIT (from Cy Ridge with all As) and hit a wall of Fs.</p>
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I have the data on undergraduate origins for students in my program for the past five years. My program is one of the undisputed top ~3 programs in the biological sciences, and is fairly large (approximately sixty students per cohort). </p>
<p>Overall, looking at this data, students from top private universities and LACs are overrepresented, and students from state schools are underrepresented, relative to the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in biology by those institutions over that period of time. The number of students who attend from all state universities together is equal to the number of students who attend from HYPMS. </p>
<p>I don’t think these numbers represent only a bias on the part of the program/field. But they absolutely don’t say anything about whether students from public universities don’t come to my program because they aren’t admitted or because they don’t apply. And this is what I was trying to get at in my earlier post – I think I’m at Harvard for my PhD because I came to MIT and realized that striving for the top PhD program in my field was a realistic goal, especially given that research opportunities and class background available to me. I don’t think I would have aimed that high had I been in a bigger pond, so to speak.</p>
<p>I think Mollie is underestimating herself…While she may not have gotten in Harvard, it’s highly likely she would have gotten in a top 5 (and certainly a top 10) grad school based on what she has said about herself. I think a GPA of 3.7+, a 2nd author paper, and very good GRE scores are enough to land admission at a top grad school. Even without extra motivation from being with peers who are ambitious, I think Mollie would have at least ended up with that at Ohio State.</p>
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<p>Yeah, but like they say, Harvard is Harvard. Harvard has a brand name and, arguably even more importantly, an alumni network that transcends disciplines, and those are traits that only a tiny handful of schools can say. </p>
<p>What that means in practical terms is ff for whatever reason, a science career doesn’t work out for mollie, she can surely obtain a nice ‘fall-back’ career in consulting or venture capital via leveraging her school’s brand and network. She would have no such assurance if she had gone to the PhD program at, say, Scripps, which is a top 10 biology program. </p>
<p>Let’s face it - science research is a tough career, and it behooves all of us to think carefully about what you will do if it doesn’t work out. Not everybody will obtain even a desirable post-doc, let alone a desirable tenure-track faculty position. Especially nowadays at a time of constrained resources, not everybody will obtain a desirable industry research job - Merck alone recently announced an additional 13k layoffs on top of 17k prior planned terminations and Pfizer is currently implementing 16k layoffs. Obtaining your PhD from a well-branded school with broad recruiting opportunities may well be an optimally risk-averse strategy.</p>
<p>I just mean that I don’t think I would have known to accumulate the proper credentials, and I’m not sure I would have been motivated to do so. I didn’t really know that this world, the coastal academic world I now inhabit, existed when I was in high school – a mediocre public high school in the Midwest is very different from a top New England prep school or a great public magnet. </p>
<p>I don’t doubt that I could have accumulated good enough credentials for a decent PhD program had I gone to OSU. But I doubt that I would have. </p>
<p>I’ve said before that I think the greatest benefit in attending a school like MIT is for run-of-the-mill smart kids like me – the superstars will be superstars anywhere, but the real added value is accrued for the middle of the pack.</p>
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<p>Moral of the story: Apparently, you don’t have to be a superstar to go to both MIT and Harvard. Being a run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-pack smart kid can suffice.</p>
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<p>Totally seconded. I’ve heard this advice given to people in quantitative fields, who may want to enter something like mathematical finance after doing something pretty unrelated. </p>
<p>And I second Mollie’s experience - a big research school really alerts you to a lot of stuff that you may never have been alerted to otherwise. Although, I should add, there are multiple flagship state schools which also fit this description, and which routinely seem to achieve good results with graduate school in some non-biological fields that I know of. </p>
<p>@Quantmech, I concede I cannot really fully explain why the physical sciences with heavy lab involvement are successful at your school in sending people places, perhaps more so than the biological sciences. You are probably right about the culture.</p>
<p>One thing I would put forward on that note is that the biological sciences, slightly like computer science (where a lot of people consider academia esoteric and boring), carry a bias towards “real world applications” – notably medicine in the first case. I would wager that a lot more people at the “top LAC / top private school” environments may get significantly enough exposed to the academia mindset to consider it a real option. Particularly top LACs involve a large self-selection, and I have heard some notable CC posters claim the so-called “intellectual types” often crowd a lot of these. Probably because, as Sakky hints, these simply don’t seem to offer the career boost that the name of an Ivy League might, and the reason for choosing them involves that sort of self-selection. The contrast is that at state schools, which tend to be larger and more impersonal, the cozy academia mentality may be nearly absent among the disciplines (by which I really mean in-school majors, not the fields themselves necessarily) less distanced from the professional world. Notable exceptions are where that public school is a true tippy top school for the discipline (e.g. Berkeley and computer science - I am sure it produces plenty of aspiring academics). </p>
<p>Simply put, most people I know in biological sciences say they aren’t really into the idea of grad school. Now I don’t think MIT gives the vibe of a “cozy academic” culture, but MIT is MIT - it’s so well known for the level of science that I’m sure the research culture permeates, and it’s no surprise it nurtures successful people like Mollie into awareness of the joys of a research career.</p>
<p>As for the physical sciences, I think there isn’t quite an option as immediately natural as medical school. I’m sure you can get a chemistry degree and do fine in med school, but it’s likelier by far to choose something in the biological sciences (particularly at large state schools which offer many easy, easier, and easiest versions of a biology degree, indirectly offering GPA boosts).</p>
<p>I will pose to sakky the other side too though, simply because he may have something enlightening to say - I have also heard that when fresh PhDs are looking to join a non-academic career, it may not actually come down to their school, beyond coming from a pretty decent school and having marketable skills may be the most important thing.</p>
<p>My understanding is that where the name of the school does help most is when you don’t have extremely marketable skills, and still want to be hired - in that case, I hear usually things will be played “safe,” and they’ll take the person coming from the best ranked schools.</p>
<p>Aside from this though, I always thought there was a discrepancy between what is required to be at the top of the heap in academia versus elsewhere, especially in quantitative fields. There’s a tendency in some areas to prefer (within academia) the research paper that most people can only understand a few lines of, while that will probably earn negative points elsewhere. So the person who went to a top PhD program might just have dug his grave deeper, not by choosing that program, but by virtue of what they define “success” to be.</p>
<p>So my question is how much * in practice* does this risk aversion (taking into account all the extraneous factors) actually work? </p>
<p>I of course fully concede between two people with the roughly same skill-wise employability, with one coming from a top school, that one will probably win in the hiring game.</p>
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<p>Let me give you a stark example. Consider 2 people earning their PhD’s in computer science, one from Harvard and the other from UIUC, and who both can’t find a post-graduation CS research position to their liking and hence decide that they want to become venture capitalists, leveraging the fact that the bulk of VC investments are directed to the software/Internet/Information-Technology space for which their education would presumably be highly applicable. I think it’s hard to make the case that the UIUC graduate would have the better odds, and I suspect that even the UIUC students would concede as much. It doesn’t matter that UIUC is far from being a merely ‘pretty decent’ CS school but is actually one of the world’s bests and certainly higher ranked than Harvard’s CS program, nor does it matter how well-versed that UIUC graduate is about the VC industry. The inescapable facts are that Harvard (along with Stanford) has a hammer-lock on the venture capital industry, and that industry is not only highly ‘elitist’ in nature, but also relies heavily upon social networking in its recruiting process, to the point that it is highly unusual for anybody to be hired by a VC firm without an insider vouching for you. Harvard provides you with both the brand-name and alumni/recruiting network in a way that UIUC never could. </p>
<p>The UIUC PhD grad’s clearest pathway to VC would instead be to found a successful tech startup and then leverage that experience into a VC job offer. But of course if you have the wherewithal to do that, you don’t need to worry about whatever career flexibility your degree provides anyway.</p>
<p>The same story could be said for strategy consulting, investment banking, private equity, hedge funds - all elitist industries where networking is paramount. Perhaps not coincidentally, these are also the industries that tend to pay unusually well, and provide excellent pathways and training for other careers (e.g. one of the best ways to obtain a top corporate management position is through a stint at a top strategy consulting house), and hence are precisely the types of jobs that many students want. </p>
<p>The upshot is that if mollie can’t find a research position to her liking after she graduates, then having the option of joining consulting or venture capital is not exactly a bad fallback. She wouldn’t really have that option if she was at a poorly-branded and networked school, regardless of how marketable her skills may be.</p>
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<p>I actually think that the better question is not how much does that risk aversion matter in practice, but rather how much that version should matter. I believe something like around half of all new PhD students will never actually complete the program, with many settling for a consolation master’s and others simply dropping out entirely. {It behooves any aspiring PhD student to ask what percentage of students have historically actually managed to finish and what program milestones tend to eliminate students, whether that be coursework, qualification exams/papers, or the dissertation itself.} Even of those that do finish, not all of them will be able to obtain desirable research/academic positions, whether that be post-docs, tenure-track faculty, or industry research jobs. {To be sure, they may be able to obtain some such position, but at a location that they or their spouse refuses to live in, or is a dead-end adjunct lecturer-ship with no realistic opportunities for promotion.} Hence, it behooves every aspiring PhD student to think about what else they are going to do if their research career doesn’t work out.</p>
<p>I know next to nothing about venture capital groups, aside from the fact that a few of my more entrepreneurial colleagues have obtained funding from some.</p>
<p>I think you should take a look at the undergraduate universities of origin of the faculty at some of the top research schools (consult the NRC rankings). One of my acquaintances at Berkeley went the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. He is now a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Richard Schrock, Nobel Laureate at MIT, went to UC, Riverside. </p>
<p>Some years ago, I served on a National Science Foundation panel to select recipients of the Presidential Young Investigator Awards, which have now been succeeded by CAREER Awards from the NSF. I was surprised by how few of the nominees came from what I considered to be top undergraduate schools.</p>
<p>Again, the situation might be different for a biologist–don’t know. Also, I can’t say much about string theorists’ prospects. But in experimental/theoretical physical science (aside from string theory), if admission to MIT for undergrad does not work out for you, you will obtain a more than fine background at a research-intensive university.</p>
<p>Also, I think several people on this thread are overlooking the role of the faculty in providing information/direction to really promising students at large universities. At MIT, other students may be providing the role models and information sources, to a significant extent, and there could be less of that at a big school. However, at a big school, that gap is filled by faculty advisers, who will notice a talented student in the crowd. It happens a lot.</p>
<p>I’ve had the impression that MIT is interested in having more alumni “of wealth.” So perhaps a pre-VC student will be appealing to them. But really, why go to MIT rather than Harvard if you are just interested in VC and not in a directly scientific career, or in engineering?</p>
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<p>Yes, and along the same lines, to state something I said earlier once again, I think the faculty at almost any pretty well-regarded school are so well-educated, often coming from utterly brilliant backgrounds, that it’s hard to imagine a student feeling like there is any lack of resources.</p>
<p>Now my previous post was discussing the “culture” of the biological sciences and other fields where there is a clear professional outlet after undergrad that its people flock to. In something like many of the physical sciences and mathematics, I think usually a PhD is in order. This is why I think the “culture” of at least the more theoretical of the physical sciences and mathematics probably infects people with the academia bug even in state schools with strong enough departments in the given field of study.</p>
<p>@Sakky, what about positions that actually encourage/require quantitative PhDs? I always felt that once those hiring actually care about that level of training in a quantitative field, their degree of reliance on more “shallow” measures like brand name would drop considerably. Of course, these positions are probably a fraction of what is available in total, although they’re also probably the most natural bets for someone with a PhD to consider. </p>
<p>What you said about VC, i-banking, etc, etc makes sense in general, although from what I hear from people with quantitative training as undergrads who work at these, the amount of mathematics or whatever else you have to do is fairly minimal for someone with any reasonable training at all. Which is why I imagine that it almost makes sense that they care about the elitist label most.</p>