Thanks, sent you message back.
As an opinion, Lake Forest offers perhaps the most traditionally collegiate atmosphere from this group.
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I’m curious why Georgetown was her first choice. Knowing that might make it easier to find the best match among the rest.
There are obvious differences just based on location.
Occidental stands out from the others as a small liberal arts college in LA with connections to Hollywood and the arts community. The other three all have business programs. It is probably the most diverse and most liberal of your choices. Despite being in a big city, it probably has the easiest access of the 4 to outdoor hiking opportunities with the Santa Monica Mountains and the Los Angeles Forest Preserve nearby. It also means that it can find itself close at times to California’s famed wild fires as happened just a couple of years ago.
Santa Clara is in Silicon Valley and has connections there. It’s also about an hour train ride from San Francisco. It has both a business and an engineering school. It is the only one of the 4 colleges that has a 50:50 male-female enrollment. The other 3 are all 55+% female.
Lake Forest is another small liberal arts college like Occidental, but the similarities end there. It is not at all as diverse or liberal. Located north of Chicago with it’s business and finance center, it does offer a business major but does not have a business school.
Like Santa Clara, Loyola has business and engineering schools. It is located in the state capitol and is a 40 minute train ride from the national capitol in Washington, DC so it has easy access to government institutions. It probably has the most urban location of the four you are looking at.
While all 4 of these colleges have access to international airports, it would be worth checking just how easy or challenging that access is - especially once traffic congestion is factored in.
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No traffic congestion at all getting from the San Jose Airport to the main entrance of Santa Clara University. The number 10 bus is free, and goes from the airport to the train station which is right across from the main campus entrance for SCU. 10 minutes in thrown the bus.
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Thanks. Do they have flights to Europe?
I do not know about direct flights to Europe from SanJose…but the airlines that fly there connect to almost all the major east coast airports.
Here you go…
I would guess that with covid restricted travel internationally, this might not be completely accurate…or will be subject to change.
Thank you. I checked and there have been changes over the last few years, because of Covid.
Thanks, Bill_Marsh. She visited G-town when she was much younger and loved it, is pre-med and they have an outstanding pre-med track, and wants to be in a closed campus. Really helpful comments you’ve made differentiating the schools.
This flight thing was posted from today…
@JLPatterson i sent you another message. I never got your message. Are you sure you hit reply?
Aside question…are you expatriates or are you citizens of another country. I ask, because you mention pre-med.
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Hi there - I sent a fairly long message and thought I’d hit reply. Wanted to thank you for your kind offer. I will see if this goes through now to confirm before I send more.
This came as a reply on the thread…not as a message.
Loyola strikes me as the best alternative to Georgetown. They have had success getting their pre-med students into med school and have a defined city campus.
Just my take on it.
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If it were me, I’d be choosing between Loyola MD and SCU. If you prefer the east coast for travel purposes, I think Loyola is your best option east of the Mississippi River. SCU your best option West of the Mississippi River.
Those Jesuit colleges are terrific. They really know how to do higher education well.
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At the moment there are no nonstops between San Jose and Europe, and I wouldn’t expect them to return anytime soon. The San Francisco airport (SFO) is only about a 35 minute drive from Santa Clara, and you can also take Caltrain from SFO to the Santa Clara Caltrain station near SCU.
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Occidental and Santa Clara stand out on your list. Others have talked about Santa Clara, which has a reputation for being wired with Silicon Valley, so I’ll just put in a good word for Occidental. My son considered the school seriously a few years ago, and we visited the campus. It’s an excellent school academically, ranked within the top 40 liberal arts colleges in the country, and the campus is compact and beautiful and located in an interesting neighborhood. It is very accessible to the center of Los Angeles, but it is located in a leafy area a little to the northeast. The closest airport is Burbank, which connects to major domestic airports, although LAX is also possible. We are also overseas, and in terms of distance, we concluded that once you are in the air, it’s only a couple hours more to get to the West Coast (or the East Coast in our case, as we are in Asia), so it’s not that big a deal. Occidental would be a very different experience than GW, but if being part of a small friendly, liberal and creative college community and living in a beautiful area appeals to her, I wouldn’t write it off. We had a very good experience communicating with the admissions representative responsible for Asia,so you might consider reaching out to the representative responsible for Europe with any questions you have.
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@simba9 thank you. I’m not surprised about no direct flights to Europe from San Jose CA. The only direct that used to happen was to London. With so much international travel suspended, it’s not surprising that this has been suspended as well.
You are right…SFO isn’t a big headache to get to.
And as I said earlier, the flights from San Jose connect to every east coast airport that does have international flights…so that is an option as well.
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The problem I have with the west coast schools for a kid from Europe is the added 3000 miles of travel. Add extra time in airports if she can’t get a direct flight. And as much as I like Occidental, it’s in a bad spot in relation to LAX, especially with traffic. I don’t see how either of those schools are worth it over Loyola, which is a good school and has a good pre-med program.
And it’s not just travel for the student. Being far from home, I’d like to think that the parents/family could visit her more often than just at graduation. Four years is a long time and one never knows when a visit home or from home will be needed.
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Thanks, for this. As a parent I love the idea of Occidental based on what I’ve heard and on my reviews of the school.
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Interesting points. For her, that extra flyover time across the country is beginning to mean something after Covid and having had friends get stuck - and panicked - for a while. The pre-med quality is attractive too.
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