Princeton vs Yale

cmburns14
Wed, 31 Aug 2011 22:35:30 +0000

Wildwood and FightThe Tide- I certainly didn’t intend to insult any large group of students- but I was being realistic. I’m sure you know that the economy is really bad right now- nearly 10% unemployment, 15+% including discouraged workers. Many new grads have to work retail since they do not have relevent professional experience. Hopefully, the job market gets better in the next few years, but the economy is very cyclical. You have to prepare yourself so you can get a decent paycheck when you graduate.

If you want to get hired today- the most important skills are accounting and computer programming. Princeton is OK on the former and world-class on the latter. If you have some experience in one of these two areas, you will be very marketable.

Anthro, psych and bio as undergraduate degrees don’t really prepare you for anything in a professional sense. That is why there is great appeal in medicine as a career- high pay, high status, lots of work but lifetime job security.

The tradeoff is that it is very difficult to get in, and admissions officers do not care at all from which undergraduate institution an applicant graduated- whether Princeton or William Paterson. They also don’t care if you majored in chemical engineering or sociology. What they do care about is that you graduated in the top 5-15% of your college class. GPA is virtually everything, conditional on your MCAT meeting the threshold.

400 students is, I think, a pretty good estimate. A lot of students take classes like organic chemistry II at a local school over the summer, or as a post-bac. More likely, students drop out of the pre-med track either as freshmen or sophomores when their GPAs are wrecked by Princeton science courses.