Poor College choice...WWYD?

TheAnalyst
Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:10:20 +0000

Our son scored above a 1200 on the SAT, with a 700 on the math portion. His high school GPA was in the top 25%, so well above the average stats listed for WVU. He by no means feels that he has any greater intelligence than the other students in his classes. There may have been some of that fall of his freshman year, but those students were gone after that. I think that likely holds true for biology as well because that major attracts a lot of pre-med kids, who are motivated to make top grades. I’m confident a serious student could find plenty of like-minded people with whom to study and hang out. At the same time, a student who just wants a piece of paper could probably arrange his course schedule to make that happen with little effort as well.

There is definitely a wider variation in the quality of students on the campus compared to a school like UVA where our older son attended, but a high quality of education as well as good career prospects are available from both. Last spring our older son was competing head to head with a WVU engineering student for a job. It was one of those things were a group of seven students from all over the country were flown out to California for a three day interview process with a big firm. The WVU engineering student and the UVA engineering student were obviously both considered to be equally attractive candidates for this very high prestige job, despite the differences in the average stats of students at the two schools. Our son did not come away with an offer (although he did land a fabulous consulting job overseas that fits him better anyway), but he was fairly confident the WVU student would get an offer because he felt he was the most impressive student in the entire group.