<p><a href="http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2007/03/sloan.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2007/03/sloan.html</a></p>
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[quote]
The foundation awarded 116 Sloan Research Fellowships this year. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the only institution with more recipients than Northwestern. MIT had seven while Harvard University, like Northwestern, had six.
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<p>:)</p>
<p>Events like these lead me to believe that Northwestern deserves more credit than it gets as a "backup" university for Ivys.</p>
<p>Well I'd rather go to Northwestern than any Ivy..., except maybe Penn.., lol.</p>
<p>Northwestern is probably not a backup school in regards to Cornell...
With the exception of HYP and maybe Columbia, I probably would not choose an ivy over NU. Chicago, Evanston, chill atmostphere...everything's great..!</p>
<p>And let's not forget Prof. Charles Taylor who won the 2007 Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities, the world's largest annual monetary award, valued at $1.5 million.</p>
<p>Having attended NU for undergrad and an Ivy for my master's, I personally had a far more positive, well-rounded experience at Northwestern and am grateful for the opportunities that the school provided me (not the least of which was the means to get into a top master's program, and ultimately, a solid PhD program).</p>
<p>That being said, there are certain advantages to the nuts-and-bolts education that the Ivies offer. I think that humanities students at those schools receive stronger research training than they do at NU (I found myself playing catch-up my entire time in the MA program), but the overall experience of attending Northwestern as an undergraduate is absolutely unbeatable.</p>
<p>Also, while the students at schools like NU are roughly similar in talent to those at the middle Ivies, they tend to be less pretentious and less prone to attitudes of self-entitlement and inflated self-importance (NU students are more "blue collar," in a sense, while students at Ivies--at least at some of them--get a bit jaded). You can't argue with the Big Ten sports scene, either, even if NU is more often a bridesmaid than a bride. The football scene is a crapload of fun.</p>