Hi everyone! I’m an international student that intends to study Molecular Biology/Biochemistry in college. After undergrad, I would also like to go to grad school as well.
My problem here is that I have no idea where to go. My choices are:
University of Toronto
Boston University
Northeastern University
UC Davis
And I’m also waiting on a decision from McGill. Besides these in North America, I also got offers from Imperial College London, UCL, University of Manchester, etc from the UK. However, I’m not considering Imperial and UCL, or in general the UK universities because I didn’t really like it there when I went to visit, and also because I do the full IB diploma and I honestly can’t meet their (Imperial, maybe UCL) offers.
I was initially quite set on UofT, but then realized how much students in Life Sciences there seem to complain about the competition, the difficulty to get grades above a C, how big the classes are, etc, which started to worry me that I won’t be able to obtain good grades. Or I’d just have to stay up until 3am for them, like I already do for IB. However, UofT is definitely the best for me in terms of the tuition, since I have a Canadian citizenship (dual citizenship).
Boston U is kind of out of the list, since I got not scholarships. For Northeastern, I got 15K starting from the sophomore year, for each year. Which is nice, but still not enough. As for UC Davis, I really didn’t feel like Davis was right for me when I went to visit. Money isn’t a huge issue, to be honest, but I still don’t want to make my parents spend over 70k for Uni…
Should I just wait for McGill? My only concern is what their offer would be for my IB diploma, and if I’ll even get in since I haven’t heard back yet (I handed my application in at the beginning of January).
Any feedback/advice would be much appreciated!