Ok. Not many options. As an international Virginia Tech and Northeastern didn’t award me any aid, nor should I have expected them to do so. Is Minerva worth it? Especially for Biomedical Engineering (or Natural Sciences – Cells and molecules concentration in Minerva’s case). WPI’s program stands out as pretty good, top 25 according to a couple of websites, top 3 according to College Factual. WPI hasn’t sent me their financial aid package – are they as generous to int’ls as they are with US-citizens?. Minerva is somewhat affordable and they’re still offering me an aid package, yet I distrust their program in that it looks good for business and social studies but not so good for science and research.
I know WPI’s aid has to do with merit along with need so here I go:
ACT 30, GPA 7.91/10 (top 10%ish in Argentina’s most prestigious school), 800 SAT BIOM, 790 SAT CHEM, 680 SAT MATH2, 111/120 ibtTOEFL.
45k savings, 25k/year household income
I’ve never heard of Minerva so I cannot comment. WPI is a very good school but if the financials don’t work out, Minerva will have to, I guess.
Minerva isn’t a real school, doesn’t have a real campus, doesn’t have tenured faculty - in fact, I wonder if they have any regular faculty at all, or if it’s just lots of temporary faculty. If you want engineering, you have to attend a college that offers it, which Minerva doesn’t. If you want to attend grad school, you have to attend a college with some sort of proven track record, which Minerva also doesn’t have.
If you can afford to spend four years traveling around the world to have a great “experience,” then go for it. If you actually want an education, and WPI proves unaffordable, attend university in Argentina.
And sorry if I offended any Minerva fans, but I don’t consider any for-profit college a real school - in the end, their bottom line is their profit, and not their students.
Minerva at KGI isn’t for-profit - as of now, it’s an experimental college trying to prove that colleges don’t need athletics, huge campuses with pools and gyms, etc., and that educational technology/software can make a great difference in how teaching and learning works. However, I agree that I’d be uncertain about their program for Engineering.
I do want and intend to pursue a PhD and specialize in research. Does that automatically rule out Minerva? I am rather keen on the biomedical side of biomedical engineering rather than the electronic-ish and process engineering, so though not being an engineering school it didn’t sound so bad. I appreciate VERY MUCH your sincerity, please be as blunt as you can’t.