<p>Hey, folks, give yourselves a break. The gorges in Ithaca are beautiful, but people don’t commit suicide at Cornell any more than anywhere else (in fact, less, if recent statistics are to be believed). It’s just that the gorges make any suicide that occurs more spectacular. Students have joked about this for decades (“if I screw up on this prelim, I’m gonna go out and gorge it”), but people are more likely to use the gorges to make out (unfortunately sometimes in the view of the frat boy louts whose frat houses overlook the gorges). Second, the hospital in Ithaca is not 20 miles away, it’s in Ithaca – or more exactly, just outside the city limits on the Trumansburg Road. Ithaca is a city of 30,000 people, so although the hospital is on West Hill, and Cornell is on East Hill, you can get there pretty fast.
Cornell is competitive for premed students, as it is anywhere. As for engineering, I would study at a place like Swarthmore where students have much smaller classes and more hands-on experience, rather than the large lecture hall where a professor spends 50 minutes writing on the board and the students copy (Cornell engineering students call this “one, two, three, copy!”) and it is pretty much the engineering school experience for the first 2 years, as it is at other engineering schools. Lately, many schools, including places like Duke and Stanford, are claiming to be moving away from that ancient teaching model – we shall see.<br>
Oh, and the gorges: unfortunately they are much more beautiful in the late spring through early fall than when there is snow on the ground. For some unexplained reason Cornell has not gone for a Stanford or Dartmouth three or four-term year, which would allow students and faculty to take full advantage of the summer months.</p>
<p>The reason why the Cornell med school is in NYC is partly because it offers a much larger pool of patients than in a small town. Cornell is not planning to move to New York City or anywhere else. Ithaca is a very pretty college town, like Burlington or Chapel Hill or Ann Arbor, and a very agreeable place to go to school. As with those other college towns, a lot of people decide to stay in town after they graduate.</p>
<p>Go where you will enjoy. They are all very different places Penn-urban, NU-suburban Cornell-rural. I do not no much about penns campus culture, but I know that Northwestern has a large theater/music/artsy influence that almost dominates the campus. Cornell has a kind of amorphous campus culture that will pretty much be whatever you want it to be. But at this point, the prestige/bonus a school will give you in med admissions is negligible.</p>