Applied and got accepted to Brown, Penn and Cornell in the old days, and picked Cornell, primarily because of the gorgeous setting and a really cute guy I met there during my visit spring HS senior year! All the Ivies seemed fairly equal to me academically, so I made my choices based on more "holistic" attributes of the campuses.
Princeton seemed very male-oriented back then, so I didn't apply, but now it seems almost perfect. Yale, Harvard, and Columbia were too urban, and Dartmouth was too remote/outdoorsy. Still feel the same about those schools after visiting with my kids. Turned out Penn was too urban for me too, but I guess I applied anyway? I was 17....
Of course, I would likely get into none of the above if I were actually applying today!
shawbridge5678 replies53 discussionsRegistered UserPosts: 5,731Senior Member
Princeton. It was male oriented back then. It had/has a world class faculty with an undergraduate orientation (differs from Harvard which is very grad-student oriented or Brown which doesn't have nearly the same faculty strength). If I had a tech-oriented kid with some semblance of being well-rounded, I'd pick Stanford. Possibly Yale, though New Haven is a bit of a drawback. But, I think leadership has caused Princeton and Stanford to advance relative to Yale (and others) over the last couple of decades.
@shawbridge If Stanford were an Ivy, I also would have listed it above, as my first choice. But, it wasn't really an option for answering OP's original question about an Ivy directly. (I probably also would have had USC as a top 5 favorite!)
Replies to: Which Ivy would you pick and why?
Applied and got accepted to Brown, Penn and Cornell in the old days, and picked Cornell, primarily because of the gorgeous setting and a really cute guy I met there during my visit spring HS senior year! All the Ivies seemed fairly equal to me academically, so I made my choices based on more "holistic" attributes of the campuses.
Princeton seemed very male-oriented back then, so I didn't apply, but now it seems almost perfect. Yale, Harvard, and Columbia were too urban, and Dartmouth was too remote/outdoorsy. Still feel the same about those schools after visiting with my kids. Turned out Penn was too urban for me too, but I guess I applied anyway? I was 17....
Of course, I would likely get into none of the above if I were actually applying today!