Duke vs Rice vs Carnegie Mellon

collegemom3717
Sun, 31 Mar 2019 13:01:32 +0000

Some of your pros/cons suggest that you have already made some decisions…

In particular: you say that Pro-Duke is easiest travel time: “only 2 hours by plane”, vs Con-Rice is “can only get to Houston by plane- 4 hours” vs Con-CMU, an “8 hour drive away”. On the face it, that is all accurate- and who wouldn’t prefer a 2-4 hour plane trip to 8 hours in the car?! Except of course- if where you live has direct flights to Houston, they have direct flights to Pittsburgh also. And based on your flight times, I’m guessing that Duke isn’t far off an 8 hour drive either.

Also, after visiting you reference the stereotype of the students, not what your impressions were of the actual students you met were. You give it only 1 ‘pro’ for itself (engineering)- the rest are generic about where it is. It looks as if your thumb is already on the scale wrt CMU, so I’m reversing the question: what’s keeping CMU on your list?

On the Public Policy comparison between Rice & Duke, be aware that a career in public policy will require grad school ~3-5 years after undergrad.

Overall, I agree with the others: visit both places and pay attention to the feel of the place, and choose the one that seems most like you.

Note that it might not be the one with the ‘best’ re-visit day! The re-visit day is a straight-up sales pitch: choose us!! (which feels great after all the selling of yourself that you did to get the offer). But you need to apply all the usual filters that you would when you know somebody is trying to sell you something.