<p>One nice thing about Pitt is that it offers some nice merit to OOS students. It isn’t expensive to begin with, and with your scores you might get 5-10K in merit. That would bring your residual to about 33-38K next year. My D starts there tomorrow, but not in nursing. I visited the school for the first time last week and was favorably impressed. I love the city of Pittsburgh and have since family moved there a couple decades ago. It has a lot going on and great museums and nightlife. Carnegie Mellon is across the street from Pitt, and there’s Duquesne and Chatham as well. Lots of hospital facilities, including the VA right across the street, and Pitt’s own world-renowned medical center. On my tour of Pitt I saw a clean, pretty campus and and a very un-Philthadelphia-like city. The Honors housing was at the top of the hill, suite-styled, and probably 20 years old. Rooms were bigger than they were in most of the residence halls, I was told, and certainly 3 feet wider and a couple feet longer than I expected. The sports arena was quite nice, as were the athletic facilities inside. I didn’t see the school of nursing, but I did see the lovely Gothic “Cathedral,” now about 100 years old. It was lovely, and I managed to get into a couple of the “language rooms” where the different languages and [european?] ethnicities of Pittsburgh are celebrated. The science buildings, neuro and bio and chem, were older than the dorm, apparently, but adequate. The only real high-rises I saw were the Cathedral and the Towers dorms. These, as I was told, were to be avoided, if possible. </p>
<p>I hope that helps even tho it tells you little about the nursing school. I’ve known someone for a long time who went to Georgetown nursing, and so we’re down there all the time. Lovely campus, of course, again with some neo-gothic architecture mixed in with the modern and neo-Georgian. I love this campus, and my friend tells me that it’s a first-rate nursing school. But, geez, Georgetown is expensive, and not very generous either, in my experience. good nightlife in the Gtown part of DC, and good shopping. Expensive homes surround the school, and there is no absence of wealth among the students. I live just outside DC, and I really like this city. Again, tough to get into, and maybe even tougher to get into for nursing.</p>
<p>My friend also worked at CHOP in philly, and had frequent contact with the Penn students. She found them very good students and their instructors good nurses. HUP was a little more run-down at that time, but I don’t know what it’s current status is. I know nursing there is one of the best in the nation, and that their interactions with Wharton and with policy institutes can be really cutting-edge. It’s somewhat reassuring to think that our top nursing schools are not only requiring such accomplished students to fill the roles of the dedicated, multi-tasking nurses of the 21st century, but that there are young people out there willing to commit to a career that can be taxing in the extreme, like Wall Street banker taxing. Nurses seem to do in 8 or 9 hour shifts what bankers get done in 15. It’s a very intense workday with much sicker patients than when my friend entered the profession. The rewards are large but not always immediate. Thank goodness there are young people willing to do this.</p>
<p>I know more about the med school at UVA than the nursing school, but they often share instructors so it should be pretty good. What I see on your list are a lot of really tough schools to get into. In addition to SDSU, do you have any matches and, more importantly, safeties? There are certainly state schools that would love to have you and that you could afford.</p>