conflicted and confused

JHS
Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:04:09 +0000

I just want to underline something from demosthenes’ excellent post: there are plenty of smart, intellectual students at Cornell (and lots of other colleges). The University of Chicago is a wonderful institution, and unique in its way, but it doesn’t have a monopoly on Chicago-type students, and its uniqueness involves fairly subtle differences, not absolute ones.

To the OP: Objectively, Chicago is not $24K more wonderful than Cornell, but to an individual student it might well be. I don’t think that’s enough money to make your decision for you.

I agree with unalove’s response to your question about the Core, but I note that if you want a well-rounded education with a science major, you can do that at a place like Cornell, too, by taking humanities and social science electives. The Core at Chicago will force you to do that, and will give you a broad, cross-disciplinary overview, but it’s not the only way to educate yourself.

As I posted in another thread, lots of people would really prefer living and going to school in Ithaca vs. Chicago. If that’s the kind of person you are, that’s a perfectly good reason to choose Cornell. If that’s the kind of person you aren’t . . . it works the other way around, too.

Finally, one of the negative things one hears from time to time about Cornell is that the premed classes can be very competitive in a nasty way, something that I don’t think is true at Chicago. A biology major is going to spend a lot of time taking those classes.