^ Many good points. The great thing is the diversity available to kids today and the wealth of information readily available which may help them to navigate through the maze of information. Back in my day, that was clearly not the case… pre-Internet. Back then, you may have requested a handful of school catalogs and, if you are lucky, visit a couple schools too. It was easy to be sold - even sold a false narrative - via the school’s own marketing materials. I certainly had buyer’s remorse at Hopkins and wished that I had chosen Brown or somewhere else instead. The pre-professional obsession and general cut-throat tone did not appeal to me… and JHU just lacked the overall college experience IMO. I expected and wanted more.
Today, kids have a wealth of information and many ways of learning even very specific or nuanced things about each and every school. Sits like CC can be an invaluable tool if used properly. But still… nothing beats self-inspection… especially in-person on campus.
Hopefully this OP completes the college visits and chooses the best fit… avoiding buyer’s remorse once there.
OP, I strongly suggest that you visit any school before you choose to apply ED to make sure that it is a good fit. From how you described yourself, VU may not be the right school culture wise for you and your guidance counselor seems to share those concerns. I think the culture at Vanderbilt and Northwestern are very different.
To respond to some of @WWWard’s comments about Northwestern, my nephew just graduated from there and he really loved it. He was in engineering and actually graduated after 3 years because he was able to use his AP credits. He was very involved in ECs and other activities: staying physically active, engineers without borders (went to Africa to head up a team to build a well pipeline), attending concerts, had his own radio show, etc. He debated whether to graduate early and decided last spring and the company hiring him as a summer intern gave him a permanent job offer instead and he is now working regular hours and making almost six figures a year so he had no problem with job placement. He stayed on in Chicago so that he can still be with his friends for their senior year and because he likes the city. He’s building a boat now in his spare time to keep busy. . . .
I don’t think that NU’s culture is as intense as JHU, but if you are interested you should visit and you definitely need to consider the weather. My DS (not a STEM kid) isn’t considering Vanderbilt because he doesn’t like the preppy, fraternity based social environment, but he is also not considering NU because he wants somewhere warm and other schools are better for his academic interests (also not sure that the quarter system would be to his liking) so these are very individual preferences.
I don’t see myself being similar to the JHU crowd you mentioned. After all, one of the main reasons I cited published rankings is because schools rankings are almost never brought up in my social circle.
Also, I have nothing against VU and it’s unfortunate that you accused me of “consistently attempting to belittle VU”. I saw that you were all over the map in comparing various STEM fields and your claims were inconsistent with various published rankings, which I thought were important for the OP to see in order to get a more balanced view. You didn’t cite your sources so any reasonable person would be suspicious but thanks for clarifying at the end.
^^ No worries. The goal with my involvement on this thread was to merely offer my own perspective, which includes the impressions of others I know or have interacted with over time. Hopefully the OP found some of the inter-exchange of info and thoughts helpful. Since NU remains high on my daughter’s list… glad to hear that its culture is less similar to JHU’s as some have suggested to me before.
@pittsburghscribe : Anecdotally, my sophomore year, I had a roommate that transferred from Northwestern (he wanted to be closer to family and liked the political science program a little better) and he said the two felt very similar to him academically and seemed to have somewhat similar cultures in terms of it for the things that they both offered. He even said that they felt similar socially EXCEPT that the lack of the sports scene was very obvious at Emory and said that it lacked unification in that sense (he claimed that he liked Emory’s campus better; meaning, to me he is a weirdo who confessed that he didn’t like the Gothic styled architecture, but the point is, he is one of the many people whose happiness may be easily influenced by things like weather and perception of campus aesthetics). Interestingly, I remember how lots of people used to compare WUSTL, Emory, and NU to each other, but of course the former and the latter were and still are more prestigious and selective. JHU was always looked at as the more “hard-edged” one even when compared to these. It may or may not make sense. I really never thought much about how JHU would often stand out from seemingly similar schools, but that may be because, again, it and Chicago were essentially the same model at one point.
It’s like outside of the Ivies (and the non-Duke/Penn top 10s), you had those 4 and then Duke, Vanderbilt, Penn, ND, GTown all have similar “feels” to me. These were the exceptionally socially vibrant bunch (sports and/or Greeklife gave them a much funner vibe regardless of how rigorous they are. VU and GTown also are pretty solid locations). The others were the “quirky and academic” (though 2/4 of them do focus on quality of life a lot, but it is more so through facilities like housing, amenities, and ground keeping) bunch. Rice is is the weirdo in between.
