<p>where should i go?!?!?! My appeals went through for LA, but i'm still waiting on Chicago's waitlist. IF i get into UofC, what should I do? The 'rents don't like chicago at all just b/c of name recognition, while i'm totally in love with it.</p>
<p>what's your major?</p>
<p>Congrats. If your parents are worried about name recognition, do a search for some threads on the subject and keep a few things in mind.</p>
<p>1) Overall name-recognition is extremely regionally biased. I come from the Northeast, at a high school where kids regularly go to the ivies and rarely go to Duke, Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, or even Northwestern. These schools are fantastic, but they're just not considered to be the same as an Ivy. It's really their loss.</p>
<p>2) University of Chicago is a "University of" school. Penn has the same problem among the common folk, as does Berkeley and MIT ("Massachusetts Institute of Technology? Is that, like, the University of Phoenix Online?") </p>
<p>3) A lot of name-recognition comes from sports. Hence the bias towards UCLA, Michigan, ND, etc. Chicago's a proud member of the NCAA Division III and a member of the UAA, also known as the "Nerdy Nine."</p>
<p>4) Your future employer might not care where you go to school. If you want to be a journalist, for example, your boss is going to paying a lot more attention to your writing samples than he or she is going to pay attention to where you graduated from and how you did. That person might not know the school. If you are considering going a route where employers will care about your school, they will know about Chicago. If you're a wine expert, you're going to know all the labels, if you're a college prestige expert, you're going to know all the colleges.</p>
<p>UCLA is going to rank higher in terms of name recognition among random people on the street, so if that's really important to you, go there. But I would hazard a guess that any employer in finance/business/medicine/law is going to recognize UChicago as being a much better school than UCLA. This isn't a knock on UCLA, it's a fine school, but to suggest that its name recognition is better than UChicago's among people who matter sounds pretty uninformed. I know I'm being a pretentious jackass, but it's true.</p>
<p>Jack is spot on. The University of Chicago has much better name recognition than UCLA among business, law and medicine elites. No doubt about it.</p>