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<p>NMD’s daughter rocks, there’s no question about it.
I still don’t see why it’s not fair game to critique such a high school culture, though. That’s not a critique of NMD’s d in the least.</p>
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<p>I was waiting for Tufts Syndrome! JHS neglected to put it in his list! :)</p>
<p>I think I’m the only poster in the history of CC who is taking my kids to Boston to look at Tufts (among others), but not Harvard or MIT :-).</p>
<p>Sorry Pizzagirl, you’re not alone. In the Boston area, my husband took D only to Tufts and Brandeis and I can do you one better, in New York they saw NYU and not Columbia. The shame they have brought to our family…</p>
<p>I don’t mean to sound like a pause for a commercial here, but a practical suggestion for sending care packages or books to your Rhodes scholar at Oxford: amazon uk - no customs issue and free shipping too! and skype and the gmail version of free online communication (with pictures) works just fine there.</p>
<p>mamenyu,</p>
<p>Yes, amazon UK is great for thinigs they carry. Believe it or not, though, they don’t carry some things that you can get in the US.</p>
<p>I should add that I have ordered books before from Amazon UK that were not published in the US, and found that book shipping was not even that expensive. And I even got 4 day delivery for 5 pounds or so a few years ago just before Christmas!</p>
<p>Skype - great if your kid spends lots of time in a room by her computer. Mine does not. But when it works, it is great - we got a “tour” of her room just after she moved in last year by video skype. Very interesting…</p>
<p>Chicago is not second-tier, I would say.
Cheers on a great post, OP.</p>
<p>Again, let me remind you that we thought UofC was a great school, even during the application process, even if it was much less well known 6 years ago. The problem was logistics. Anyone who had a kid attend college a long way away should understand our concern. If a problem arose (and one did), we could not just hop in the car and be there in a few hours (try a few days…). Orchestrating flights for holidays was a challenge I am glad I don’t have to do anymore. Those drives in June and September were interesting family road trips, but I doh’t miss them. I’d much rather use a week off from work to go on a real vacation. Driving I-80 and the Ohio turnpike is just not my definition of a pleasure vacation. (and lets not even talk about the Indiana toll road…).</p>
<p>It is no wonder that folks want their kids to attend college within a few hours of home.</p>
<p>Chicago is not second-tier, I would say.
But cheers on a great post, OP.</p>
<p>I am on Year 5 as a Chicago parent, and I have yet to drive there. Nor do I plan to. I do, however, worship Southwest Airlines, Midway Airport, and the 55 bus. And, once in a while, UPS.</p>
<p>But, yes, since my daughter graduated and moved to New York, 90 miles away ($10 Megabus, 75 mins. Amtrak, 2 hrs. and about $50 in tolls and parking by car), we have seen her more than we did in the previous three years. Nothing wrong with that.</p>
<p>pizzagirl- Another one here. With our daughter (Rice '07), we were in Boston to visit Tufts and also did a drive-though of Boston University. We did NOT visit Harvard or MIT- we were around the campuses a little bit, but not with an eye towards her ever applying. She had no interest in them.</p>
<p>I find it hard to believe that Chicago was that much less well-known as a great school 6 years ago than it is now. Even in the Northeast. My older sister began there in 1970, and it isn’t as if people didn’t know about it. I almost applied there myself (high school class of '72) but ended up deciding that I didn’t want to be at the same school as my sister. However, I certainly thought of Chicago at the time as being a wonderful school, easily the equal of my two safety schools (Penn and Columbia). (Neither of which, needless to say, would have been remotely “safe” for me had I been applying to college 35 years later, when my son was a high school senior!)</p>
<p>JHS:</p>
<p>I loved Chicago, but the airfares and general logistics were a concern (SW Airlines is about to open in Boston, but I don’t think it will fly to Chicago). I had a horrible experience last March going to and returning from Chicago. Missed plane, weather, etc… And for families on a budget, the costs are considerable. Now S is coming home soon on the Megabus for a fraction of what it would have cost to fly to Chicago and for not much more time spent in transit…</p>
<p>^ Thank you. Exactly my earlier point.</p>
<p>Assume nothing, especially relative to exclusion, when making judgments about a student body. Add to marite’s post not only that but the financial aid situation, which added to other costs (financial and otherwise) eliminates Chicago as an option for many a “studious” and “intellectual” student.</p>
<p>Back to fit, though: It’s clear that OP’s D was research-headed, and my understanding is that such opportunities are perhaps more evident & encouraged for an undergrad there than for undergrads in many other environments. Add to that undergraduate opportunities to take graduate-level courses, and in retrospect the trajectory for her was perfectly logical.</p>
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<p>I suppose it may be field-dependent. Since my H is an economist, and I know lots of those ‘dismal scientists’, U Chicago has always been considered a very top school in our conversations. I know several people of my generation (old) who have a bachelors from Chicago and a doctorate from Harvard, or reverse. When my son was a high school senior, we were having lunch with one of those UChicago/Harvard people, and he could not believe it when we told him U Chicago was not considered by many to be a peer of HYP.</p>
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<p>Never heard of it until CC.</p>
<p>More familiar with Northeast schools, Stanford, Berkeley, U Wisc, U Florida, UT, etc. We look for engineers from certain schools and I’ve never seen U Chicago on our list. I don’t know of any graduates from U Chicago in my workplace either.</p>
<p>^^^There is no engineering program at U Chicago. Nada. None.</p>
<p>The fact that the computer science program is part of the math department rather than in an engineering program is the reason my son decided, reluctantly, and at the last minute, to go elsewhere. That is one field in which hands-on research is not optimal (or at least they did not convince son otherwise).</p>
<p>DonnaL: </p>
<p>I think there’s lots of evidence that, yes, in fact, Chicago was that much less well-known as a great school 6 years ago than it is now. In 2004, when the OP’s daughter applied, Chicago received fewer than 8,000 applications (I think; I haven’t gone back and checked precise numbers) and accepted almost half of them to fill a class that it was trying to expand beyond 1,000. This year, only six years later, it looks like Chicago will have at least 15,000 applications (and probably more than that) and accept somewhere around 20% of them to fill a class of 1,350.</p>
<p>Certainly anyone who was plugged in to Northeast elite-college culture in the 1970s knew that Chicago was a great university, and “easily the equal of . . . Penn and Columbia”. However, in the early 1970s Chicago was struggling to attract enough qualified undergraduates to keep the college alive, and the university was seriously considering abandoning undergraduate education. I don’t know what your sister’s feelings were, but lots of the people I know who are alumni of that era are very ambivalent about their experience – they tended not to be happy campers there, although they are all proud of what they learned. People there have spent the past 20 years steadily improving the quality of undergraduate life at Chicago, and over the past few years the cumulative effect of that has really kicked in.</p>
<p>^^ Shucks, I had a great time in the 70’s there. But maybe my standards/expectations were low :)</p>
<p>I have been impressed with what my friends (all dorm mates) from then have done with their lives. Surprising number of college professors, although interestingly, not the ones I would have predicted at the time. I think one of the outcomes of their ‘mission’ is that middling students turn on and end up as profs. </p>
<p>What team does this put me on?</p>
<p>I picked a date at random for Southwest (January 11th) and found 5 nonstop flights, Boston to Chicago, for $79.<br>
Midway Airport has become a much busier (though easy to use) facility than it was even ten years ago. 25 years ago it seemed about to close down for good. Hard to believe that before O’Hare opened post WWII, it was the busiest airport by passenger traffic in the world.
The airport has played a small, overlooked part in the increased popularity of undergraduate education at the U of C.
The school has become more undergraduate oriented as the number of undergraduate students has increased. You used to see few U of C sweatshirts and more undergraduate sweatshirts from the schools the PhD students and professional school students attended. The expansion of the undergraduate school almost precisely coincided with a rising number of high school graduates and the wider interest in elite college education generally.
This likely isn’t news to many here.</p>