Johns Hopkins or Cornell

bonanza
Sat, 31 Mar 2012 07:04:01 +0000

Both are great schools so you can’t make a serious mistake. Academically, they are peers and it’s a wash. Both are known to be challenging, rather difficult schools (BTW, I think that is good;some of the other ivys are too easy).

Now for the differences. Cornell is big. Very big. And it feels very big (walk from one end of campus to the other and see how long it takes. In comparison, Hopkins is small (@4800 undergraduates). You can walk anywhere on campus in 15 minutes.

The campus. Hopkins is beautiful and the buildings are of uniformly high quality. Cornell also has beautiful parts, but other parts not so much. Basically, the Cornell campus reflects the hybrid school that it is. The buildings related to arts &sciences look like the private Ivy League school that that it is. But the parts of the school related to the “Contract Schools” are not nearly as nice and look like a big, public institution (which they essentially are). No one at Hopkins is studying agriculture, hotel management, or industrial and labor relations.

The town. Baltimore is a big city with everything that entails, good and bad. It is also on the Northeast Corridor just an hour from DC and less than 2 from Philly. NYC is 3 hours. Ithaca is a nice small city in the Finger Lakes region. It is great for outdoor stuff (weather permitting-it is much colder and snowier than Baltimore). But it is not near anything else. And it is particularly far from Cornell’s medical campus which is in NYC. At Hopkins, you are 15minutes from the medical campus.

Of prime importance of course, they both have great lacrosse teams and are long time rivals. But Hopkins is #1 right now. They might face each other for the national championship on Memorial Day.

Good luck with your choice