I am faced with the difficult situation of picking out where I want to go.
I got into Duke and Yale. What are some reasons I should/should not pick Duke...or Yale(if you're knowledgeable in Yale) I'm not extremely concerned with the name of Yale since Duke is also prestigious - but maybe you can expand on this if you want. Money is no issue since I received a great financial aid packet. Eventually I want to go to medical school, but I do not want to major in the typical medical student majors like: chem, biochem, bio, etc. A list of pros/cons would be very helpful. Thanks!
Oh, I also got into Stanford and Dartmouth. (of which is now not my top 2 choices)
Yale--I love Duke and am going there, but Yale was my number 1 because of the opportunities it offers to its undergraduates. Try to read posts #9 and 54 on this thread. It's not about the same thing but those posts have some input about the unique opportunities and students at Yale.
why are you deciding between Duke & Yale if you got into Stanford?
You should probably attend stanford admit weekend.
I got into duke, georgetown, yale, brown & am headed to stanford.
stanford has everything to offer including the weather.
go cardinal!
Growing up in CA I always felt basically that way: "everything plus weather". But it turns out that as excellent as Stanford is, it was a little overrated by me. In my high school, it was hands down the best, although sometimes you might want to go to Harvard if you had really annoying parents. Turns out, that's not the national perception of Stanford. The reality is that people always tend to overrate schools in their own area -- it's just a regional bias.
Certainly Northeasterners will look at you a little funny for not going to Yale, whether you choose Stanford or Duke.
But it's all worth it when you find yourself loving four years, ending up with great options -- and all three schools will provide that -- for medical school, and coming out of it with great friends. All the places have great kids.
At the end of the day, the question is this:
Would you rather go to the same school as Dubya, get mono, or have Mike Nifong watching your every move?
but they definitely don't have a good basketball team.
Duke is such a well-rounded school--it's good at everything, and what I love about it is that it's constantly taking the effort to make itself better, instead of just sitting at the top and being content with that. No other school has what Duke has: top athletics, top education, and top social life. How does it get any better than that?
And in response to your obsession about name and prestige--high schoolers get caught up in that very easily. I know I was definitely the same way, but you have to know that once you actually go to college, none of that even MATTERS anymore. When I go back to visit my high school and I see people from my graduating class there who go to Harvard or Yale I don't think to myself "OMG they're so much better than me because they go to name schools!!!!!!!!" And from what my classmate from high school told me about New Haven, it's boring as hell there and there's seriously nothing to do outside of Yale. There's a TON of stuff to do AT Duke AND outside Duke. You never get bored here--trust me. Duke has everything--who wouldn't want to go here?
Thank you all for responding. I'm planning on visiting Duke on one of the Blue Devil Days as well as Yale's Bulldog days.
Warblesrule, I have no idea what i want to major in.
Bluedevilmike, I don't understand the mono and Nifong reference.
Lilpixy, I'm not obsessed with name and prestige. If I was, then I would immediately enroll in Yale. But since I'm not, I am currently losing sleep over this task. haha. j/k. What kind of stuff can you do outside Duke?
I've heard some not so nice things about the grading system in Duke. Apparently students are competing for grades with others in their class, by this I mean the grading scale. Do you know anything about this?
Alias865 - no idea what you mean. There was a move afoot many years ago to have teachers not only assign grades but also ranks in the class, and then some computer system would collect all that data and somehow spit out who the valedictorian was and who got Latin Honors, but that system was not meant for anything involving grades and was also never adopted...
I experienced and hear more on the order of students having individual competitions with the course, rather than their classmates, and that this is one of the qualities about Duke that people find attractive.
Alias-
Are you asking about grading on a curve? Our son is in Pratt (engineering) and says that there is a strong anti-grade-inflation environment. So, I guess you could say that the curve, by definition, has students competing against each other. But, that's not the way students behave. There is a good deal of collaboration, cooperation, and support--more than I ever saw in my "flagship state U" science courses.
