Chance me for MIT or Columbia and other colleges (Junior) [3.9 UW, 1540 SAT, Biology/pre-med, TX student]

Just a general observation. There is an extremely wide variety of different professional careers available that can be both personally and financially rewarding for the right person. Most kids, and indeed parents, only really know about a fraction of these.

A great thing about good four year colleges is they have career offices that can help you explore all this. Professors, older students, and so on can also be very valuable mentors. At many colleges, you can wait to pick your major, or easily change it, as you get a better idea what makes sense for you.

All this means you really don’t need to have this mapped out before college. You do want to make sure you can comfortably afford it. It is good if it has a wide variety of good departments and majors, and flexibility about picking a graduating major. But then you can get started, and use all those resources to figure out what you really want to do next.

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