<p>I like to think mine is a "special" dilemma :P</p>
<p>But it's not a pleasant one to be honest, it will be extremely difficult to turn down both places. </p>
<p>In Oxford, I will be doing Biochemistry, while in UChicago i intend to do Chemistry with a minor. Then again, I can delay declaring my major in UChicago and I could end up doing Bio, Physics or even some humanities. </p>
<p>Any opinions?</p>
<p>Chicago — you don’t seem to be sure what you definitely want to do.</p>
<p>I agree. You don’t want to be bound to biochem, but you don’t want to turn down OXFORD. Hey, which is worse, studying something you aren’t too sure you love, or turning down one great university for another equally great, marginally less prestigious one?</p>
<p>The ultimate decision here should be based on where you want to eventually work and settle in. If you’re not an American, you would have a hard time going to the US with a working visa even if you graduated from Oxford/Cambridge. In the same way that a HYPSM grad who’s not British would have a hard time looking for a job and be actually allowed by the UK government to work and settle in. Special cases abound, however, they don’t come abundantly. </p>
<p>Therefore, if you want to work and eventually settle in the US, going to Chicago and earning a degree from there would actually be a better spring board for you to realize your dreams. If, on the other hand, you want to work in the UK or go back to your own country after acquiring your degree, going to Oxford would be the better option.</p>
<p>Both of them are great universities but they provide vastly different educational experiences. At Chicago you would spend much of your first two years taking mandatory humanities and social science classes, which leaves little room to explore different science disciplines before declaring a major. Of course, Oxford wouldn’t let you take a single class outside of your major. Oxford has a reputation for letting students learn as much as they want to learn. You will have the opportunity to learn a lot, but in the big math and science lecture classes no one will push you to work harder. (And I heard that the minimum requirements to get by are rather low.) That will be very different in the small upper-level classes at Chicago. Chicago might also give you more opportunities to do research with a faculty member if that is something you are interested in. (In the UK, students may not publish in scientific journals until they finish their PhD. Since undergraduate students are so far away from getting a PhD, no one wants to run the risk of having an undergraduate co-author on a paper.)</p>
<p>I would pick the one that suits my sense of education. I personally decided not to apply to Chicago because I couldn’t imagine taking a full year’s worth of humanities classes as a science major, but your preferences might be different. </p>
<p>RML has a good point about thinking about where you want to work eventually. But I wouldn’t let that completely determine my decision. You can always get a Master’s degree in a different country afterwards.</p>
<p>If you are not sure about your major, then Chicago is a better option for you. Oxford’s Biochemistry course is one of the best in the world, but it’s highly specialized, see a description [here](<a href=“http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate_courses/courses/biochemistry_molecular_and_cellular/biochemistry.html”>http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate_courses/courses/biochemistry_molecular_and_cellular/biochemistry.html</a>). </p>
<p>BTW, I disagree with B@r!um when she says you won’t have as many opportunities to do research at Oxford as you would have at Chicago. Quite the contrary, the 4th year of the undergraduate Biochemistry course at Oxford is almost entirely research-based.</p>
<p>Thanks so much for the input guys! Still 1 month to think about this…and I think I will be making visits to both places</p>
<p>
ITA with Elastine and Tetrisfan. If you unsure of what you want to do, UK schools in general are a very poor choice for you. </p>
<p>I have no idea why b@r!um thinks UK students are not allowed to publish papers. I have a paper from my final year undergraduate project, 1 from a summer job and 4 from my PhD (which were published before I graduated).</p>
<p>Sorry about that. I got that impression because two of my professors keep telling us about tensions between former grad students and their advisers at (at least) one British university because they didn’t let students publish papers before they defended their dissertation. I mistakenly generalized it to all British universities, and it might have been some policy from the past that has been discontinued. My bad.</p>
<p>If someone happens to know specifics about the policy I was thinking of, please let me know. I would love to learn to what extend it is still enforced.</p>
<p>All in all, it’s Oxford all the way.</p>