After McGill --> Grad School

Blobof
Tue, 01 Jun 2010 15:20:16 +0000

XferStudent:

Thanks for the input. I know McG/Emory both send students to amazing grad schools.
But my question is, which school has an higher % of sending students to grad schools such as HYPMS, Columbia, UPenn.



Percentages mean nothing. Students who apply to grad school from McGill apply to a different selection of schools than Emory, thus numbers don’t exactly compare nicely if available. For one thing, McGill student will apply to other Canadian schools (University of Toronto, UBC and Waterloo in particular, but that depends on the field). Plus at the grad school level it also depends a lot on departmental affiliations and connections (I was in math with minor in CS, a lot of classmates went to MIT and Harvard, a few to Stanford, Chicago; Johns Hopkins, Berkeley and UDub for those in statistics; very few decided to go to Princeton or Yale, but at least four went to Oxford…). That’s why I keep repeating that the biggest factor in getting to the grad school of your choice is you, not the school you go to for undergrad (it can have a some influence, but between comparable institutions it’s negligible).

ETA: bernie2012 is right as well. Picking the school environment that is best fit for you to thrive in is important. McGill and Emory are great schools but if you’re not comfortable with the school’s mentality or setting you probably won’t do as well as you could potentially, and that would hurt your grad school chances as well.