<p>Yeah sorry your original post reminded me of this one <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-pennsylvania/1316861-penn-cas-way-deal-hyp-heartbreak.html#post14154286[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-pennsylvania/1316861-penn-cas-way-deal-hyp-heartbreak.html#post14154286</a> and I just couldn’t take you really seriously. I’m glad that you are starting to see the light though. Though you say these things now, you’ll only truly get to understand them when you get here - look forward to it.</p>
<p>Glad to see every forum has its share of trolls since many of the trolls in this forum come from Penn or Duke.</p>
<p>Glad that people in real life from Penn or Duke aren’t like that though. I met a few friends from those schools and they are fairly nice and sensible people. It’s sobering to know that college rivalry really doesn’t change who you are.</p>
<p>^
What I’ve actually seen from those forums is that a lot of students at non-Wharton Penn and Duke suffer from the same paranoia I did just a few days ago. It’s just human nature.</p>
<p>Once again, these boards do not represent the students at the school in any way. This is like the dark depths of human society.</p>
<p>These boards represent a wide variation of people, with their good/not-so-good motives. It is not solely the “dark depths” that are encountered, it’s just that the not-so-good minority can be very loud and ugly. So, they sometimes get unduly noticed; and they sometimes must be refuted. Sometimes the good posts, and good posters, get noticed too – like the renewed positive spirit, and intelligent realizations, demonstrated by Saugus (and others) in this thread.</p>
<p>Quick question:</p>
<p>At what point (in the flawed US news rankings) do the education and resources actually begin to noticeably decline? At world-class universities, of course there is no difference, but there is with a school like Arizona State.</p>
<p>In my opinion it’s best to evaluate schools in tiers of 25 or so, remembering that certain schools that fall into lower tiers can have stellar individual programs. It is also helpful to remember that every rankings methodology has its unique bias, as well as its particular flaws. So, they need to be reviewed critically; that is, they should be treated somewhat skeptically, and with a good grain of salt.</p>
<p>you can use this:
[|ARWU</a> 2010](<a href=“http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp]|ARWU”>http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp)
As i said no rankings are truly accurate - you can just go on several ranking sites and kind of get an idea if need be.
For example, USNWR notably inflates penn and this notably inflates berkeley, but I’m pretty sure you can get an idea if a school is great by going on several sites with credible ranking methodology</p>
<p>I think it more that in the top universities you will find excellence everywhere, both in faculty members and in the intellegence of the student body (which may be the more important of the two).</p>
<p>As far as resources, etc – I honestly couldn’t say that you would learn more in an Ivy than in the honors program of a school ranked 50-75 (or even lower). It’s a very hard question.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is definitely an important thing to keep in mind when evaluating tiers of schools.</p>
<p>Saugus, I am glad you are doing better. I actually copied some of these posts in this thread, yours included, to send my son who was accepted to Cornell and is trying to decide on which school to commit to. I understand your parent’s attitude but am surprised considering if you ask someone in the USA or around the world to name top universities iworldwide, Cornell will always make the list. Here is one list that names top universities around the globe. Cornell is listed as 16 compared to schools in every country. So, just imagine how great an honor it is to be going to a school making this global list. As I have told you before, I predict that you will one day live your dream and work at a top firm/company in NYC, taking your clients to the Cornell Club in the city for lunch, etc.</p>
<p>Be proud of your accomplishment and get ready for future successes.</p>
<p>This is a very nice essay.</p>
<p>Also, I know this is the complete opposite of the point, but I think Princeton=Stanford>Yale in terms of prestige - even though “prestige” means very little between two top schools.</p>
<p>[Ivy</a> League Universities / Schools Ranking - U.S. College Rankings](<a href=“http://www.uscollegeranking.org/ivy-league/ivy-league-universities-schools-ranking.html]Ivy”>http://www.uscollegeranking.org/ivy-league/ivy-league-universities-schools-ranking.html)
Several more.
For me there are like, three different types of ivies - the HYP, the middle-large sized, and the small sized.
And yes prestige really does mean little between two top schools</p>
<p>Hello Saugus,</p>
<p>First off, congratulations - and welcome to Cornell!</p>
<p>Double congratulations really - your post shows a <em>lot</em> of personal growth in such a short time. (I wonder if some of the thoughts you expressed, you’d actually been considering a bit below the surface for some time now?)</p>
<p>It’s natural for you to want to listen to what your father says. If he’s like most fathers, he only wants what (he believes is) best for you. In this case, he is very much mistaken. Cornell’s research and other programs can compete equally with any university in the world.</p>
<p>Also, while people talk about Cornell being a suicide school that is just not true. Of course, every year a few students there commit suicide. Newsflash: That happens pretty much everywhere. The college years are stressful ones, and not everyone can handle it.</p>
<p>Cornell, as you probably know, has many gorges. That means that of those who might want to kill themselves, a few can pick a way that’s much more dramatic and probably have witnesses too, unless those who take a bottle of pills in their room or wherever. In fact, someone can have an accident and fall into a gorge and some people might think that was a suicide. (For example, one fraternity was suspended for a time because someone went to their party, got drunk and fell off a bridge on the way home.)</p>
<p>You’re absolutely right about it ultimately boiling down to gut feeling. That’s because, as you’ve come to realize, at this level it’s simply “the top” and when you choose between the colleges you do so based on subjective fit - how well the connection works for you.</p>
<p>And btw, that also goes the other way around. With applicants, too, once you’re a serious candidate for an Ivy or, say, for Berkeley, William & Mary (my wife’s alma mater), Georgetown (her law school), UVA (her brother’s alma mater)…you get the idea…the selection process necessarily gets subjective. Any top-level school is going to get many, many more excellent students applying as it can even think of accepting. So it hinges on things like recommendations, interview reports, stuff like that. </p>
<p>That’s why it’s been said that being successful in life is a much greater function of where you <em>applied</em> than where you <em>went</em>. Not to mention it’s an even greater function of your personal qualities - empathy, writing skills, courtesy, persuasiveness, motivation, yes political skills too. That’s because even if you go to your first-choice university, and even if it’s a place like Harvard and you get a four-year-full ride and make Phi Beta Kappa and graduate summa cum laude and class valedictorian…on your first job you’ll find yourself either among: </p>
<p>(1) A host of similar Ivy Leaguers who don’t care about your achievements because they’ve matched them already, so now what matters is how well you do on the job or </p>
<p>(2) A host of mainly non-Ivy Leaguers who don’t care about your achievements because they’ve already discovered they don’t mean more than a hill of beans off campus, so now what matters is how well you do on the job.</p>
<p>And of course it’s even more important with more personal things, like friendships, dating, joining clubs, even finding good roommates. If you and they didn’t go to school together, They. Don’t Give. A. Hoot. where you went. Unless you’re a total jerk about it in which case they just flush you down the toilet, and then stop caring.</p>
<p>If you’re starting to see a pattern, good for you!</p>
<p>In my freshman admission rounds, I figured Cornell was my best shot. I applied to Yale, Princeton, Brown, Cornell, Tufts and Georgetown. Final score: 0-6. Not even a waiting list. So I picked from my two safeties I’d been accepted at, and chose American University in Washington, DC because I was very interested in politics.</p>
<p>But just a few weeks after getting the denial letters, I wrote back to all the top schools asking for transfer admission materials. To make a very long story short, my first order of business upon arriving in Dc was to set up a P.O. Box for that sort of thing. Finally, five transfer applications: Harvard, Yale, Brown, Cornell, University of Chicago. This time, one acceptance: Cornell. (And FWIW, I get the strong feeling I was one of their borderline applicants. I got no invitations to any accepted-student events or anything like that.) </p>
<p>Well, I jumped on that acceptance with both feet - after waiting to find out Brown’s response - along with Harvard, Yale and UChicago, they turned me down. (I think I was borderline at Brown and UChicago too; UChicago’s admissions office called me out of the blue just a few days before sending me my letter, to ask me a few things and thus solidify their decision one way or the other.)</p>
<p>Thing is, though, while I was at AU, I was in their Political Science Honors program, including a seminar personally taught by the dean (and another seminar in the spring). The other dozen or so students, most of them would <em>not</em> have been out of place at any Ivy. And much the same was true in my other Honors courses at AU, including a World Politics seminar. (AU is a medium-sized university, and freshman seminars were and are, AFAIK, the exception not the rule.)</p>
<p>One of my AU Honors classmates went on to become majority counsel for a House of Representatives committee. Another became a high-ranking Federal civil servant and now runs her own business on the other side (helping people dealing with the agency). Another is an ethics officer at a company whose name you’d probably recognize. (She told me that she applied to Yale and had reason to believe that she would have gotten in but for her financial aid needs.)</p>
<p>An older classmate of mine at AU actually joined me on my way to Cornell because he went to Cornell Law School. He went on to become corporate counsel for a Wall Street firm whose name you’d recognize.</p>
<p>More recently, I met a student at the University of Maryland who’d gotten an admission offer to Cornell…and a full-ride to UMD.</p>
<p>Last but not least, the acceptance rate (both freshman and transfer) for Cornell’s Arts & Sciences College at the time was c 25%. Keep that in mind when judging schools by that statistic.</p>
<p>Takeaways:</p>
<p>(1) Cornell is on a level with any other top school. At that level, it’s up to you to pick a good place - which you’ve already done - and then succeed there and beyond.</p>
<p>(2) Your <em>having</em> a ticket to Cornell is one heckuvan opportunity, which many, many people who could eat you for breakfast don’t get for whatever reason. And they’ll be waiting for you.</p>
<p>(3) Prestige is nice for your personal “achievement chart,” and it feels good when you’re with fellow Ivy Leaguers. It does open a few professional and social doors - but then again so do many other assets which are much less dispensable anyway, that I mentioned above. Beyond that, your Ivy diploma (as distinct from what you learned, much of which isn’t academic anyway) + $4.00 will get you a gallon of gas.</p>
<p>(4) [Best</a> Colleges & Universities - Ranked by Job Recruiters - WSJ.com](<a href=“Best Colleges & Universities - Ranked by Job Recruiters - WSJ”>Best Colleges & Universities - Ranked by Job Recruiters - WSJ)</p>
<p>Anyone who wants to talk more about any of this, please feel free to post here or drop me a line!</p>
<p>Once again, congratulations - and as Han Solo famously pointed out, don’t get cocky! (If you do, don’t worry - it won’t last long!)</p>
<p>Happy Easter!</p>
<p>Jeff Deutsch
Cornell A&S (Government), 1990</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That’s probably where you went wrong. High school is not a stepping stone.
College does not define your life, and I’m sorry if you have to type an essay to prove otherwise.</p>