Please help me narrow down and select schools!

chsowlflax17
Tue, 29 Dec 2009 04:37:00 +0000

Wow if you’re a senior you’ll be in for a lot of last-minute writing/editing. It’s refreshing to see someone applying to Yale having Chicago as their first choice. Why do you like Chicago, besides the programs it offers?

If it’s about friendliness, then I don’t know too much about Coluumbia, except that people go there in large part due to the city, and New York’s reputation isn’t as a friendly place. A few people do go to Brown because it’s a New England school with a really personal atmosphere: as a CS major I hang out with jocks, engineers and linguists on a daily basis, all in the same group of friends. And I do know some jocks who ARE extremely smart, even if they don’t show it off.
As for competitiveness: Brown’s about challenging yourself, and making the most out of your own education. Being able to take courses pass/fail means you can go out of your major, into a course that will really challenge you, and not worry that it’ll mess up your GPA. Again, bringing back up CS: the intro class I took (I’m a frehsman) was competitive in the fact that you wanted to be able to show everyone that you did well on the projects, that your stuff worked according to spec. However, if you worked hard enough to get your programs to run according to spec, you were an A student, regardless of whether most the rest of the class managed to do it too (don’t get me wrong: the class was hard. But if you put in the effort, you could get the desired grade, regardless of how much effort your classmates put in).

And if you’re not interested in partying, it doesn’t really matter what the party atmosphere is like. However, Brown seems to be a pretty social place, and some of the highest-achieving students do go out and party, or go to activities like debate tournaments or social events. If you make any sort of effort to hang out with people, there seems to be people at Brown willing to embrace you in their social atmosphere.

As to the other schools, I don’t know enough about them to give you real good advice, sorry.