<p>Okay so I'm going to be going to Johns Hopkins for pre-med and biomedical engineering (they rank #1 for both) but all these people that I know keep bragging about how they're going to Duke, UChicago, Columbia, Northwestern, and Brown. I lookat the rankings and these schools only out rank mine by a couple and JHU out ranks brown and northwestern. And for what I'm going into it outranks all of them. But people tell me that it's about the overall academic experience and the core curriculum that teaches you the basics and prepares students for the real world along with philosophy and perspective on life. Such as the base curriculum UChicago has which I am having a MAJOR loss on. Is this true or a bunch of BS, and will it truly affect my overall intellect both in the short-run and long-run? Should I be proud going to JHU, or feel the pessimism of not getting into a better on? I'm not bragging here but it's really brought me down....Thanks for you help in advance all. ps. I'm posting this in all the top university threads so don't say it belongs in John Hopkins.</p>
<p>I think you're worrying when you should be celebrating. You can pick up these things you think you need to have a good education at Hopkins in addition to the coursework in BME. Congrats on getting into the BME program there; I know how competetive it is!</p>
<p>Amen, darkruler.</p>
<p>Just because you're BME doesn't mean you can't take the initiative to take those challenging, interesting, meaty classes that will expand your intellect. I admire your drive to do more than just your major.</p>
<p>And I think most people would laugh that you think of Hopkins as a less satisfying school than any of the others you mentioned... to me, it sounds like somebody asking, "Should I trade in my diamonds for emeralds?"</p>
<p>Well ofcourse I want to study more than just my major. I want to get a great glimpse of college life and experience, and a new insight on the work, I don't want to be a computer processing premed data. I assume all schools offer such, but does Hopkins have a core system? And for all of UC students, is the core really to expand intellect or is it just a base set of requirements that jsut gets done with while you study your major?</p>
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And for all of UC students, is the core really to expand intellect or is it just a base set of requirements that jsut gets done with while you study your major?
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<p>It's there to expand intellect. It couldn't be further away from the latter. That doesn't mean that there aren't a few people who see it that way, though.</p>
<p>And yeah, you should be very proud to be going to Hopkins. Anyone who says that Hopkins is inferior to any of the other schools simply doesn't know -- and rankings generally mean very little.</p>
<p>Hopkins is a great university, and its BME program is supposed to be great. You should be happy and proud to be going there, no question. Anyone who suggests anything else to you is, basically, ignorant. What's more, as a BME pre-med at Hopkins, I think you'll find that a much higher percentage of your fellow students share your interests than would be the case at most of the other colleges you mentioned. Your focus is more mainstream there than anywhere else. That can be a bit of a mixed blessing -- one of the best parts of college is having friends with different interests, and learning from them -- but Hopkins is certainly strong and diverse enough to afford you lots of opportunity to learn outside your major field, in and out of the classroom.</p>
<p>Please don't get hung up on the my-college-outranks-your-college thing. No single undergraduate can take advantage of even 1% of any of the fabulous opportunities all of these universities offer, and even if you could tell whether University A offered 2% more opportunities than University B, that would have just about no effect on the life or education of any single student. And high school students on CC completely, totally overrate the importance of college brand names in the post-undergraduate world, and often undervalue the universities that get mentioned less on TV (although, at the moment, that isn't Hopkins' problem).</p>
<p>I wish this ranking stuff would just disappear. Johns Hopkins is a truly great and highly respected university particularly for BME and medicine. The main attraction to the Core is that it is laid out for you in broad categories from which one can choose, and everybody is doing it. Almost all great universities offer similar courses that are there for the taking if one so chooses.</p>
<p>My girlfriend will be an entering freshman at Hopkins in the fall while I'll be starting my first year at Chicago. I couldn't be prouder of being her boyfriend. Don't worry about it, and congratulations.</p>
<p>Hopkins does not have a core. If I remember correctly, it has an open curriculum with a required writing course. Besides, I agree with above posters. JHU is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, I plan on EDing there!</p>
<p>Actually, the derision you are picking up towards Hopkins is really just the undercurrent of a bigger wave of anti-intellectualism directed towards the sciences - particularly engineering - at Ivy League caliber schools. </p>
<p>The consulting-law-banking nexus is the undisputed high horse at most elites. Now there is nothing wrong with this per se. Approached in the right way, these can all be rewarding fields of great social import. However, the unfortunate truth is that a sizable segment of students in the majors that historically lead into these areas, mainly the soft social sciences like economics, political science and history, love to rail against any student who chooses a more challenging curriculum (i.e. the sciences) which does not lead to immediate and superior financial gratification upon graduation. Consequently, institutions that are heavily invested in this line of work to the degree that their brand name hinges on it - JHU, Cal Tech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, etc. - get all sorts of nonsense heaped on them. They are only for gunner Asians, lab rats, people who could never hack it on Wall Street, those who lack communication and leadership skills The list goes on and on. Its a sadly pervasive philosophy that explains why America is falling behind in many critical, high value added economies of tomorrow. Add on top of that that most of these same detractors believe they certainly would have earned flying colors as an engineering students and its scorn squared. </p>
<p>But lets be realistic. From a pure prestige perspective saying you are studying biomedical anything at Hopkins will elicit even from farmer Joe a certain degree of wonderment. Moreover, even if you dont go to medical school with all the trappings of career success that carries, and instead end up in the biomedical sciences somewhere at a company like Novartis or Amgen, you are walking straight into a boom market with a chronic shortage of qualified, work authorized, native English speaking graduates. It is pretty much win-win. All you have to do now is make it through four seasons of Survivor: Baltimore.</p>
<p>Reading uchicagoalum's post reminded me of James Chandler's convocation address. It applies, I believe, to Hopkins as well as to Chicago and speaks to the scholarship versus leadership false dichotomy.</p>
<p>Education</a> in the Interrogative Mode</p>
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If your education here has gone well, indeed, you will by now have acquired what the ancient rhetoricians called the art of prolepsis. This is the knack of anticipating possible objections in the course of making your arguments. If your education has gone well, you will have come to believe that the best work — the best argument, theory, or judgment — is work that takes account of the hardest questions that might be posed against it even before they are raised.</p>
<p>I can imagine that you might yourselves right now be wanting to object that all this attention to the interrogative mode leaves our style of academic culture vulnerable. You might think it vulnerable, for example, to the invidious boast of other universities that they produce leaders, not scholars — a distinction that is not only invidious but also false, which I’ll try to show in a minute. Perhaps you also worry that our attention to the interrogative mode is vulnerable to a certain kind of ridicule...</p>
<p>In the end, the key thing to understand about good questions is that they open us to the world even as they focus the mind at the same time, which is why the antithesis of scholarship and leadership is so misleading. Last month, at a national humanities meeting in Philadelphia, I heard an address by an Iowa Congressman — a Republican, as it happens — who made a similar point with a pointed question about questions. “Is it not likely,” he asked, “that our national leaders would have asked better questions — and thus made better decisions—about Iraq, for instance, if they had seriously pondered the intricate exchanges of the Melian dialogue in Thucidides’ History of the Peloponesian Wars?” </p>
<p>Here, where Thucidides’ book is still widely read and debated, I suspect many of us will agree with the Congressman, though perhaps not without a further question or two. The greatest scholars and the greatest leaders must alike be responsive to the best and toughest questions, and they can do this only if they know how to pose them. It is not enough to have an insight or an intuition. You must be able to say what question it answers, and why, and what questions it leaves yet to be resolved.
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