Colleges similar to UChicago?

JHS
Tue, 10 Nov 2015 15:10:01 +0000

Chicago is a liberal arts school. Its undergraduate program is similar to what you would find in many LACs. The same is true at most elite universities, at least in their arts and sciences schools (for those that have different schools).

If your goal is to be a physician, it’s silly to exclude liberal arts colleges from consideration – many good liberal arts colleges have strong basic science programs and are very successful at preparing students for medical school. Research opportunities are harder to come by, but there’s less competition for them, too, and the colleges often bend over backwards to make certain their students get the experience they need to be top candidates. The colleges all are committed to strong science and math programs, and are much less competitive admissions-wise compared to research universities of similar statute for science-oriented applicants.

(This isn’t medical research, but a kid I know very well was a computer science major at a top LAC. The college gave her funding to work in a top laboratory at an Ivy League university over one summer, and she continued participating in their research and writing remotely after the summer ended. She got exactly the job she wanted when she graduated, working alongside people from Harvard, MIT, CMU, and Stanford. My nephew at a different LAC got interested in a field for which the college didn’t have competent faculty. They hired a well-known professor from a university in the area to supervise his research, fully funded the research, and then gave enormous financial and nonfinancial support to a new program he started based on his research.)

The mix of urban and intellectual at Chicago is hard to duplicate, except at colleges with similar ridiculous admissions rates (like Harvard, Yale, and Columbia). Johns Hopkins is worth looking at. So is the University of Rochester, which has consciously modeled itself on Chicago as it restructured itself over the past 15 years or so. And Rice, which is strong in sciences and has a very good residential college system. People have already mentioned Reed and Swarthmore, which are both a little suburban but with good access to a city, and which both have intellectual cultures similar to Chicago’s.