<p>Hi
Could anyone comment on the following schools?
-University of San Diego
-Santa Clara
-Redlands
-Occidental
I am mainly wondering how strong they are academically.
Any help or additional suggestions would be appreciated.</p>
<p>I would say that Occidental is the strongest, followed by Redlands/USD and then Santa Clara. Now I’m going to comment on things from your other threads.</p>
<p>If you were to throw Pitzer on the list, you would have access to the other Claremonts, making it fairly strong, but if you do well in Occidental and study certain subjects, you can take classes at CalTech or have an accelerated law degree from Columbia. Both of these are very competitive programs, but they show the potential available at Occidental. Here is the official infor</p>
<p>Exchange and Cooperative Programs
California Institute of Technology (Caltech)</p>
<p>As a full-time student at Occidental, you can take courses at Caltech in applied science, astronomy, engineering, or other fields not taught here. While the program is usually not open to first-year students, you receive full credit for all courses taken. No additional tuition payments are required. Caltech is just 10 minutes away in Pasadena.
Art Center College of Design</p>
<p>If youre majoring in art at Occidental, you can take courses at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, one of the countrys top-ranked art schools. The program is not open to first-year students, but as with the Caltech exchange program you receive full course credit. No additional tuition payments are required.
Columbia University School of Law</p>
<p>With a competitive GPA and LSAT scores, Columbia Law School may admit you upon completion of your junior year at Occidental into its Accelerated Interdisciplinary Program in Legal Education. Admittance to the program would enable you to earn your bachelors degree from Occidental and a law degree from Columbia in six years.
Keck Graduate Institute</p>
<p>If youre interested in biotechnology, become a biochemistry major and maintain a 3.2 GPA in the necessary courses, you will be guaranteed admission to the Keck masters in bioscience program. The Keck Graduate Institute is part of the Claremont Colleges.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.oxy.edu/x3227.xml[/url]”>http://www.oxy.edu/x3227.xml</a></p>
<p>About Pitzer- if you’re studying certain subjects, such as psychology or sociology, it can be a far better school than if you study something like Philosophy. You’re allowed to tak only a third of your classes at the other Claremonts, so you’re almost stuck with what your school has in some senses. This is why the subject you are studying matters somewhat. Also, the kind of environment you want matters. Occidental, Redlands, and Pitzer are very different schools with different feels, strengths, and student bodies. USC- they have some excellent programs, and mostly solid program in the undergraduate level. The school is trying to make these even better, so it is on the rise. But can you get into USC? I don’t know, maybe with strong recs and essays. Your GPA and scores might hold you back, because USC, besides race (as I noticed at my school), they are very interested in numbers. You might want to look into Chapman, depending on what you’re studying and what sort of environment you want.</p>
<p>Occidental is extremely hard to get into and has extremely strong academics.
The rest aren’t too hard to get into.</p>
<p>Occidental isn’t extremely hard to get into. I last recall the percentage of those admitted being somewhere in the 40th percentile. It is selective, but not to the extreme.</p>
<p>You need more than 1400 with decent GPA if you are not urm.</p>
<p>Whoa, what are you talking about? I had a 1320, and many people that I know and that I don’t know get in with about that or less. Yes, the better the test score the better, and the better the GPA, the better, but when you say “Occidental is extremeley hard to get into,” I say, “relative to what? Harvard? Pomona? Berkeley?” There are many schools that are obviously harder to get into than Oxy, but does that mean that Oxy is easy to get into? No, about 60% of the applicants are rejected, and many people do not apply because they know they would not get in.</p>
<p>It isn’t fair to throw around false statements like “you need more than a 1400 with a decent GPA if you are not urm,” because they are false. What is a decent GPA, anyway? How about course selection, and if the student took the hardest classes available? What about letters of rec and ECs? </p>
<p>Different students get into different schools for different reasons.</p>
<p>About the U of Redlands - I visited recently and liked Redlands a lot. I felt the campus culture was a lot like Oxy - friendly student body, varied types of people (although not as obviously racially diverse as Oxy is). Redlands is just large enough (2400 students) that there is something for everyone: we saw preppy types, hippie types, skater types, and everything in between. Most kids were dressed casually - jeans and tee shirts, not khaki’s and polo shirts.</p>
<p>Academically, Redlands has a lot to offer, including excellent programs in business, education, communicative disorders, and music — programs generally not available at smaller schools. My daughter sat in on several classes, and felt they were certainly equivalent to the classes she’s sat in on at schools like Lewis & Clark, Earlham, and Beloit. The Johnston Center for Integrative Studies is an extremely interesting option - students design their own major across the curriculum, are exempted from general education requirements, and they contract with teachers to adapt classwork to their particular interests and goals. It’s a great option if you have interests in several different areas, or have a specific learning goal you want to achieve with your education. The students we talked with in Johnston seemed quite passionate about learning and their experiences. Redlands also has an honors program.</p>
<p>They also have a very good study abroad program, with their own campus in Saltzburg, Austria, as well as options in many other countries. Even science majors study abroad at Redlands, something not always workable at many schools.</p>
<p>The campus was quite pretty as well, with a new multi-million science center being built in the heart of it. We liked the combination of older buildings and newer buildings. Orange trees ring the campus, and there are palm trees down the main campus road. There is a grassy quad area where many of the dorms are located — we liked the dorms, they were mostly smaller - 2-3 stories, and well-maintained. The ones located around the quad kind of looked like large houses. Smog is bad in the fall, but better in the winter. Students seemed very friendly and happy, with a variety of types of people visible on campus. The only two complaints we heard from students: there isn’t much to do in Redlands (although we thought there were plenty of coffee shops and restaurants downtown with a trolley that takes students there) and non-drinkers can occaisonally feel left out until they find their own group. The area immediately around campus is a nice residental area. There are a few areas of Redlands that are not-so-nice, but nothing really horrible that we could see.</p>
<p>I know from several sources that Redlands can be extremely generous with financial aid and merit money — and they are willing to negotiate if you are not happy with the intial package you’re offered. By the way, I wouldn’t say Redlands is particularly easy to get into - their average GPA of accepted students is about the same as Oxy and Pitzer, their average test scores only slightly lower. They accept about 50% of applicants, but they are rolling admissions and the admissions rep we talked with made it clear that those that apply earlier in the year do get a bit of a boost.</p>
<p>Overall, I think it is a solid school, with much to recommend it.</p>
<p>I agree with DRab’s post.</p>
<p>First, to the OP, you might want to review the class profiles on the websites of these various (or any) schools. For example, as to Oxy, they show that the median range for SAT scores of last year’s freshman class was 1180-1340. So needing a 1400 as posted above…don’t think so at Oxy.</p>
<p>As several posts above indicate I’d agree that Oxy would be viewed as the “top” school of these four academically and I think, clearly so. However, IMO, they are each fine schools in their own right. I believe U of SD has an up and coming business school and Redlands has some fine programs, as noted in a post above.</p>
<p>If it is an issue for you, U of San Diego and Santa Clara (I believe too) have religious affiliations and there are typically some classes required in that area of study. Similar (religious affiliated) schools that you might want to consider are Loyola, St. Mary’s and Pepperdine.</p>
<p>The Claremont Colleges and Chapman are other small private schools to certainly consider in California.</p>
<p>This is from year 2005</p>
<p>PEALS-0503-30-2005, 11:55 PM
I’m slightly surprised. Oxy is a competitive school, but I didn’t think it was “that” competitive. It wasn’t my first choice, but it was one of the colleges that I have been interested in for a pretty long time. My interviewer was sort of cold, maybe.</p>
<p>My Stats:
Gender: Female
Location: Southeast
School: Private prep school
GPA: 3.4 (unweighted)- that’s pretty low I guess, but my school offers more rigorous courses than most publics
SAT: 1390 (far better verbal than math)
Extracurriculars: Editor of school paper, editor of literary magazine, piano, violin, swimming, volunteer at church, Amnesty International, mulit-cultural club (and those are ACTIVE memberships, not cheap space-filler to look impressive on college apps)
APs: Only three: foreign language, English and Euro His.
Interview at Oxy: Yes
Teacher Recs: foreign language teacher and English teacher (got straight A’s all year in both their classes)</p>
<p>I dunno. Maybe my essay wasn’t that good. </p>
<p>Anyway, congrats to those who were accepted! I’ll probably end up in Los Angeles anyway, because I got accepted to USC. :)</p>
<p>What’s your purpose in posting that?</p>
<p>oxypomona - oxy doesnt require 1400 or higher at all. the adcoms there emphasize that SATs are not taht important. the most important are personal character, GPA, courses taken, involvement in community</p>
<p>I got into Oxy with an 1130 and a 4.0 gpa unweighted. And I am no URM. I had many other things going for me than the sat, I might add. When I checked Occidental out I fell in love with the architecture and the aura it presented. However, the student body didn’t excite me and it seemed mighty liberal for my taste. </p>
<p>I also visited USD. I really wanted to go to school there because I love to surf. I did the overnight stay in a dorm and HATED it. I didn’t like any of the students. They seemed like airheads and unfocused. Now, this is certainly not true for everyone there. It was simply my perception of the school. To me, it looked like a place where I would become really bored.</p>
<p>I chose USC because when I went there to visit I was immediately drawn to the grandeur and family like lineage that the school has to offer. To me, USC seemed like some heavenly kingdom with its students as the royal guardians of the empire.</p>
<p>My D applied to all on your list except Occidental. She just didn’t like the feel of the campus and the smallness.It is a college that a lot of professors kids go to which tells you a lot. Redlands is a good saftey but offers a great education and some unique programs, very pretty campus. Santa Clara has a good reputation and so does USD, strong in the sciences and business, You can’t really go wrong with anything on your list!</p>
<p>Regarding Carolyn’s post…</p>
<p>I’m a graduate of U Redlands and can definitively say that when you receive your degree, you are on par with students from some of the country’s best schools. After receiving my Masters at another small, private school I went on to Oxford where I am currently doing doctoral work. </p>
<p>That said… Redlands is excellent preparation for further studies. There is certainly no ignoring the value of a degree from UCLA, USC, UW, Cornell and so on… but there is an unwritten value in the smaller LACs that groom you to debate, publish and interact with brilliant professors on a personal basis. In my grad. studies I’ve found that students from larger universities can occasionally stumble in grad. programs that require you to verbally defend your conclusions face-to-face with little preparation. While this can be intimidating, especially in your first few months, the prep. that Redlands gave me was invaluable. Not once have I not received compliments from a prof./peer on the very wide background that Redlands demands of its students.</p>
<p>I still have very close relationships with three of my profs from Redlands. You can’t beat that sort of attention and it comes out in the LoRs that they will write. Yes, the school is gorgeous… the campus has been used in several movies that I know of to replicate the “big East Coast schools” with the proximity and cheaper shooting costs in Redlands. </p>
<p>The student life around the campus leaves a bit to be desired, as Redlands is “affectionately” dubbed “Deadlands” by its students. However, you get over it relatively quickly as the students are very sociable and the parties aren’t -too- out of control.</p>
<p>If you’re interested in Comm Dis/Music/Government/Business then Redlands should definitely be on your list. Also, your note about the fin. aid is very accurate – they’re very generous. The courses are demanding and, frankly, were no easier than my courses when I was completing my MA. </p>
<p>I’ve ran into a number of Redlands alums at Harvard, Oxford and various “renowned” schools and we have all raved about the prep that it gave us.</p>
<p>In short, it’s a good call.</p>
<p>i got into oxy, usc, carnegie mellon, and santa clara and i decided to go to santa clara honors program. i love santa clara because if its great location, amazing social life and i had a scholorship there…oxy is really really small</p>
<p>oxypomona has cited that exact anecdote several times - it’s amusing how many times he’s referenced it in an appeal to “authority”. I didn’t even have to go far in the search history to refresh my memory! My advice for oxypomona - it’s great that you support your school, but there are other ways in doing so as to not appear obviously trite.</p>
<p>Where is Carnegie Mellon?</p>
<p>carnegie mellon is in pittsburgh, pennsylvania</p>