<p>I am currently rising junior, and I'm trying to decide betwee. Cornell for top choice college (the college I will apply ED to). Normally, I would just apply to both RD and postpone my decision, but I know WUSTL has a much higher ED acceptance rate. Can the same be said for Cornell? </p>
<p>I researched WUSTL extensively, and I fell in love with almost everything about itexcept the location. I d</p>
<p>Agh… Copy/paste not working well on my phone. Here’s what I posted on the Cornell forum:</p>
<p><a href=“Cornell vs WUSTL - Cornell University - College Confidential Forums”>Cornell vs WUSTL - Cornell University - College Confidential Forums;
<p>So, I can’t answer many of those with any specificity, as I’ve never been to Cornell, but I’ll give my thoughts, for what they’re worth.</p>
<p>Many of the academic criteria will be similar across the schools - there’s a reason both are highly ranked. WashU is probably a bit more pre-med oriented, but I don’t think the disparity is great enough to definitely decide one way or the other. I will say WashU is next to, and is affiliated with Barnes Jewish Hospital, one of the top in the nation. While Weill Cornell Medical Center is also top notch, it is located in Manhattan, a fair distance from Ithaca.</p>
<p>As to dorm quality and food - WashU is consistently ranked top 2 for each of those, and their rankings are deserved. Again, I don’t know how Cornell compares, but it would be extremely hard to be as good as WashU. Air conditioning is sufficient as well.</p>
<p>I love the campus and surrounding area, but it sounds like you aren’t a fan of St. Louis. This is fairly subjective, and I can’t make a claim that either university is better than the other in this regard.</p>
<p>The majority of your campus life is going to be spent on campus and in the surrounding area. While STL itself may not be as exciting as New York or Chicago, there are a ton of things to enjoy. I think that STL gets a bad rap because of East STL, which is in Illinois and across the Mississippi River. WUSTL is in a great part of town (Clayton). WUSTL has been so friendly. My son will be attending there, and I have not seen a school that went so far out if its way to make students and parents feel welcome.</p>
<p>Ryan is right about the dorms and food. And the education is first rate. That being said, what you want to study is a key factor.</p>
<p>FYI, St. Louis is not in the “South” as almost universally defined in this country. It is hilarious though that people that are from places like NY or Wisconsin think it is somewhere on the Gulf Coast, while people from the true South think it is just below the Canadian border. That being said, for the majority of the school year it is not that warm in St. Louis like it would be in New Orleans or Houston, for example. The first month can be pretty warm, and so can the latter part of April/first part of May on occasion. Or it can also sometimes be fairly chilly. There have been times even in the last decade when it has snowed on Derby Day, the first Saturday in May. Like in most parts of the country, the weather can be quite uneven and change quickly.</p>
<p>More to your point about WUSTL vs. Cornell, the schools are very close academically. WUSTL definitely has better dorms and food, and of course St. Louis is a city while Ithaca is a college town. Beautiful, but limited in its local distractions. It all depends on what it is you like to do. If you want to attend pro baseball, football or hockey games, then St. Louis is better. If you are more into cross-country skiing and/or hiking, then Cornell is the choice. Those are random examples of course. My point is that this decision is probably less an academic one and more a quality of life one, based on your particular likes and dislikes.</p>
<p>You can throw that whole notion of not liking the South due to the heat right out the window. For the record, St. Louis is certainly not in the south. It is not hot there during at least 80% of the school year.</p>
<p>I don’t think it unreasonable to consider Missouri the south. I’d consider Iowa not the south, and Arkansas definitely the south, so the boundary lies in Missouri. I find it hard to believe that one can objectively say something is south, and something isn’t, so DiscipulusBonus’s view is valid. (I’m aware that St. Louis is culturally not “southern”, but geographically that doesn’t really matter.)</p>
<p>It typically isn’t THAT hot during normal classes, but if you do want to spend the summer there, it can get quite warm (hotter than my liking, anyways).</p>
<p>Wow fallen chemist, thanks for the stereotyping. I live in Tennessee. 
FYI, I consider temperatures under 55 degrees comfortable, 55-70 tolerable, and 70+ uncomfortable. </p>
<p>Honestly, I could care less about sports, but it is really nice to have a great hospital nearby.</p>
<p>I love Cornell’s medical school, but it’s so far away…</p>
<p>RyanMK - I know very few people that don’t classify Missouri as being in the Midwest, which of course seems appropriate. It was a split state in the Civil War, but never officially part of the Confederacy. One can use whatever system they want, I suppose, but what I was talking about is the extremely commonly accepted breakdowns of the USA (New England, mid-Atlantic, mid-South, deep South, Mountain West, etc.) which classifies Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, et. al. as Midwest.</p>
<p>Discipulus - I wasn’t talking about you, I was referring to my own experiences. I lived in St. Louis from birth through high school, then spent time in New Orleans, Wisconsin, Pittsburgh, and some other places. I meant it was hilarious how few people knew where St. Louis really was located on a map, and how disproportionately north or south they thought it was depending on where they were raised.</p>
<p>FYI, I worked summers in high school and part of college at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. It is an excellent hospital complex and WUSTL is great for pre-med.</p>
<p>Sure, I know a lot of individuals, and a lot of official demarkations consider Missouri a midwest state, but I think it’s fair to say that the abrupt change between south/midwest is a bit arbitrary and forced. If the midwest was colored white and the south was colored black, I’d definitely expect Missouri to be covered in gradients of gray, as opposed to entirely one color. I’d consider Pemiscot County to be the south, and Atchison County to be the midwest, even if Missouri is “technically” all midwest.</p>
<p>Well, that’s certainly true. The southern half has an Ozarkian twang, while the northern half is “TV neutral” in its speech patterns. Lots of states have that kind of dichotomy, or are even more severely demarcated. Kentucky, for example, is really different in about 4 regions. People from Louisville up to the area just across from Cincy, for example, talk more like people from Indiana or Ohio, while just south of there you get a fairly strong southern accent. Then of course there is the whole Appalachian region, and the area in the southwest corner is fairly unique unto itself, somewhat more Ozarkian. It is difficult to generalize about most states. Even here in tiny Rhode Island, the people in the northern part tend to have the Boston accent where the r’s are dropped, only to appear where they don’t seem to belong (“I pahked the cah in Cuber”). People from the southern part have a fairly flat speech pattern.</p>
<p>Well, there’s more to it than accent, but I do agree with your overall point. There’s a lot of border states where it is hard, if not impossible, to say “This is clearly in the ______ region.”</p>
<p>My friends and I typically joke that Missouri is part midwest and part southern.</p>
<p>You can typically differentiate between the two based on whether or not the locals pronounce the state “Missour-ah” (south) vs “Missour-e” (midwest). St. Louis falls into the latter.</p>
<p>Yes, of course there is more to it than accent. I was just using that as the most outward example of differences within a state, even a tiny one. I always assume that people on this web site, especially forums such as WUSTL, are intelligent enough to fill in those kinds of things without having to spell it out. Along those lines, I had always heard that it was the northern part of Missouri that sympathized with the Confederacy, while the southern part was more pro-Union. I never did any research about the veracity of those claims, though.</p>
<p>Johnson - you are correct about the pronunciation thing. There are other interesting differences, such as in St. Louis we call things like Coke soda, while Kansas City says pop. The mispronunciation that drives me even crazier than “Missour-ah” is people that say “Illi-noise”.</p>
<p>We have obviously strayed far from the point of this thread, fun as it is. Perhaps we should return to regular programming.</p>
<p>Cornell was on my list of final schools that I visited. I liked Cornell. My observations: Much bigger school than Wash U. Even though it is Ivy League it had a heavy NY student mix because of its requirement to the % of NY residence they are required to admit. Be prepared for cold weather and a lot of snow - it can start snowing in early Nov there. Cornell is out in the middle of nowhere. It takes forever to get there. The Fr dorms were very nice - comparable to WashU. Students I met were very nice. </p>
<p>I selected WashU.</p>
<p>Cornell’s campus is much bigger. Ithaca is much colder in winter. Cornell’s sports are D-1 and far the biggest, most popular sport is hockey. Both are excellent academically, but unless you really like snow, rural environs and you feel you must go to an Ivy, I personally feel Wash U. is the winner of the two. And that’s also what my daughter decided.</p>