<p>It may be time for me to leave this CC board. After the 100,000th kid writes that he/she wants to go to a top-10 grad school, and is worried about the prestige or lack thereof of Rice or *fill-in-the-blank-university, I think I’ve finally just had enough.
There is topnotch research going on at hundreds of schools; state schools, private schools, LAC’s and at Rice. Life isn’t ranked, research isn’t ranked, and I wish to *od that USNWR had never ranked schools. Twenty years ago there was no “ranking” - and the world turned just fine. You are a 17-year-old kid who will hopefully grow and change and discover that the world is a more nuanced place than it looks to you now. If you don’t want to go to Rice, pull out and let some waitlisted kid who wants to attend do so. But I strongly suggest you stop planning your life so far in advance. That kind of tunnel vision can really inhibit the kind of growth that all kids need to experience.</p>