Finally, after a not too surprising rejection from Stanford (despite my double legacy and REA deferral!), I am done with the college process… but not really haha.
I’m interested in studying neuroscience and psychology and was accepted at UCSD for cognitive science, and St. Andrews for bio/psych. Haverford has a neuroscience minor only, but I’ve always been a girl of many interests mainly bio and english so I’m still seriously considering it.
I know these are very different schools. I guess I’m most interested in learning which school has the most intellectual vibe? Basically my main impression of the schools are the following:
St. Andrews: insanely beautiful (I visited), great social life and community, but kind of a “do it yourself” attitude towards academics (not a lot of academic support), tons of IR and language majors, super white, super rich, kind of isolated, and it gets really dark during the winter, easy for the first two years harder for the second two
UCSD: big school, practically all Californians, college system adds a little bit more of a community/slightly smaller atmosphere than most UCs, but obviously its size means more anonymity and perhaps a little less community/support, good at neuroscience apparently, but I get the sense (or at least my parents did) that the Californian vibe is a little superficial and I’m from the NE so that might take some getting used to
Haverford: great community, everyone knows everyone’s business, supportive/collaborative, perhaps less research in neuroscience, consortium w/ Bryn Mawr (does that mess up the gender ratio/dating scene?), athletic… mostly I’m just worried it’ll be too small and I will get annoyed with how few people there are (my current high school is 200 per class and sometimes that feels kind of constricting–I did have a good time there though)
Waitlist: cornell, u.chi, ucla, ucb, and tufts
I REALLY want to go to Tufts, but was wondering if I should sit on all of these waitlists anyways just to see? I’m going to have my counselor advocate for me there. Are there any cons to accepting the waitlist for all of the schools? I don’t know that much about UCLA and UCB and am not too excited to join a cutthroat environment that will sap the life out of me (I went to a magnet school and while I enjoyed it sometimes, other times I would have preferred a more collaborative space)