<p>Bluebound, do you even go to Michigan? There are plenty of rich kids at Michigan also. Family networths of 8 figures is not uncommon. </p>
<p>waiting for ennisthemenace…3…2…1…</p>
<p>
It’s curious that NYU would stick you ‘randomly’ in a school you have shown no interest in … a school that’s arguably the weakest (and one they hope to build up).</p>
<p>This reminds me of years ago, several international students were admitted ED to NYU, not in the schools of their choices, but placed in the program First Year at Florence. You have to wonder…</p>
<p>Vladenschutte, bluebound said elsewhere, perhaps in one of his deleted posts, that he was an incoming student (commence eye rolling). His sheer genius just makes him more capable of understanding higher education than we mere mortals are. </p>
<p>
There’s a big difference. Note that the OP is not admitted to the Biochem department in CAS; instead, he is stuck at Bio Molecular Science in the Polytechnic School of Engineering in Brooklyn. The OP wants to do General Studies.</p>
<p>There is no way NYU engineering is a peer of Michigan.</p>
<p>“There is no way NYU engineering is a peer of Michigan.”</p>
<p>…but, but, but, it’s in NYC!!! Well it is actually in Brooklyn and not Manhattan…but that is close…just like Newark!</p>
<p>But being in NYC gives you a better shot at a reservation at dorsia…</p>
<p>Thank you for the post! But could we post some more positive comments about U of M to get me pumped and excited for the fall?</p>
<p>You will have an amazing time at Michigan. There is a reason that their alumni are so devoted. You will have the best of everything - great educational opportunities with the added bonus of a real college experience. Don’t listen to some of the people on here; I really don’t understand some of the negativity and the ridiculous hair-splitting. I don’t know if some of these people live in the real world, because they have a really narrow view of the world. Be excited - there are a lot of people who would love the opportunity to go to Michigan! Look at some of the other threads on CC - you will see plenty of people dying to know if they are going to get in. All good things ahead for you!</p>
<p>I am sure you saw this when accepted, but the M difference video? Works pretty well to get excited:</p>
<p><a href=“"The Letter M" - The University of Michigan - YouTube”>"The Letter M" - The University of Michigan - YouTube;
<p>There are so many good things ahead of you. Ann Arbor in the fall? Amazing. You’re going to meet all sorts of people. You’re very likely about to meet the people that will be with you as you go forward in life. Some of my best friends on earth- I met freshman year. </p>
<p>You’re going to meet amazing professors and other instructors that will challenge you. It’s cool when you open a book in a class and realize, literally, that the prof standing before you wrote it, and it’s the book that sets the standard for that subject. You’re going to meet people who want to learn as much as you do. You’re going to have great talks (and sometimes fights) with classmates. And you’re going to learn so much. </p>
<p>You’re going to walk across the Diag on a fall day, and carefully avoid that M, and just be amazed at all the activity. </p>
<p>Amazing speakers are going to visit campus- and you’ll be able to go to Hill and hear them. Seriously- so many wonderful and interesting people, and you’ll have them right there. </p>
<p>You’re going to go to your first game at the Big House- and even if you hate football? You’re going to love the chills you get when you see the band take the field, and when you raise that arm to say “hail”.</p>
<p>I could go on and on- and I will if you want. But believe me when I tell you- you will be proud to be a Michigan Wolverine. I promise. </p>
<p>The OP is attending UM, not NYU. </p>
<p>Specifically has asked for support and experience to bolster that. </p>
<p>Comparisons and comments about a school not being attended at this point are off topic and strange. The OP reiterated the request just a few posts ago. </p>
<p>Thanks in advance for cooperation with the OP’s request. </p>
<p>
In congruence with some of the comments here, he is now doomed for a life of failure. </p>
<p>“Relatives at Stanford, Duke and Notre Dame tell me most students don’t even care about athletics – which is surprising.”</p>
<p>Relatives at Duke and Notre Dame tell you that most students do not care about athletic? Your relatives are misinformed. Duke students stand in line by the thousands to get tickets to basketball games. Notre Dame fills a stadium of 80,000 to capacity for every game. Last year, more Irish fans attended Notre Dame games than Badger fans attended University of Wisconsin games or Gator fans attended University of Florida games. For a university with only 11,000 students (compared to 44,000 students at Wisconsin and Florida), that is quite an accomplishment. To say that “most” Duke or Notre Dame students do not care about athletics is very inaccurate. </p>
<p>Having a strong athletic culture is a positive quality. Universities would die to have what schools like Duke, Michigan, Notre Dame, OSU, Texas-Austin, UNC etc…have. Bragging about not having an athletic culture is foolish. Schools with strong athletic traditions offer something extra. There are thousands of students at those universities who care nothing for athletics, and nobody is forcing them to attend the games, support the teams or listen to the cheers. Those students would have the same experience attending a university with no athletic tradition. But for those who enjoy attending games and cheering for the team, those universities offer an experience like no other. </p>
<p>“But clearly he knows there is value is a private education, otherwise he wouldn’t be devastated (tongue in cheek or otherwise).”</p>
<p>I am not sure how private universities differ from public universities like Michigan (or UVa). Michigan undergrads are among the wealthiest (last I checked, they had among the highest percentage of students coming from families with annual incomes over $200k) and most well-travelled, and I am comparing them to undergrads at schools like Cornell (my other alma matter) and Georgetown (my sister’s and father’s alma matter). Its endowments is among the largest (when including state appropriations, Michigan is almost 5 times wealthier than NYU). In fact, only a handful of universities are wealthier than Michigan. Even without including state appropriations, Michigan is one of the 20 wealthiest universities on a per capita basis. When you include state appropriations, it is one of the 10 wealthiest. The facilities at Michigan are among the best and costliest in the nation, and again, that is compared to Cornell. </p>
<p>Gee bluebound, here I though I was successful and happy when, after attending state colleges for both undergrad and law school, I married my law school sweetheart, moved to a wonderful town in upstate NY, became a college professor, and raised two amazing kids with my husband of now-21 years. Now I see that I did it all wrong. If only I had gone to a top-10 private school, I could have had it all . …</p>
<p>Oh, wait …</p>
<p>Bluebound, you need to get out of the wealthy enclave of Bloomfield Hills a little more and mix with the unwashed masses. It won’t hurt, I promise. Your advice to the OP is neither helpful nor as accurate as you would like to think it is.</p>
<p>Most intellectuals? Another one of those “most students at Duke and Notre Dame do not even care about athletics” statements I see. Well, that is not my experience with intellectual types, including myself (yeah, I read history and literature for fun, enjoy the theater and count gastronomy and oenophilia among my passions. “Intellects” are like most people. Some care nothing for athletics while others froth at the mouth when watching their team play. The point bluebound, is that those who do not care for athletics can simply ignore them on campuses that have a rich athletic cultures. Just because a university has a strong athletics tradition does not inhibit the intellectual vibe on campus. And while some students and faculty may find athletics off-putting on campuses with a well defined athletic vibe (like Duke, Michigan or Notre Dame), there are also some students and faculty who wish there was more of an athletic tradition on campuses with weak athletic cultures (like Brown or MIT). There is no perfect scenario. However, one thing is clear, those who care nothing for athletics can live at a school like Michigan without having to bother with the athletics, while those who do care for athletics will unfortunately never be able to quench their appetite for athletics as a school that has no athletic tradition. Either way, I fail to see how this impacts the quality of education.</p>
<p>“FYI Harvard has the reserves to turn themselves into a football or basketball powerhouse. They choose not to.”</p>
<p>It is not as easy as you think. Yale, with its $21 billion endowment (second only to Harvard), has been trying to improve its Engineering programs for over a decade, and it is not much closer to achieving that goal today than it was in the 1990s. Part of the equation is developing a reputation in the given area of improvement to attract the right personnel (whether it is faculty or coaches, students or athletes). Throwing money at the problem will obviously help, but it will not be enough on its own. It takes a long time to build up a brand, reputation and culture, and for this reason, change will come about slowly.</p>
<p>Just curious, does the GPA inflation at Ross (and other places like Harvard) hurt or help its students? Would students need higher gpas than usual to secure jobs and internships or does this gpa inflation just help them?</p>
<p>For bluebound18:</p>
<p>1) I’m not clear on the selection of your screen name since you seem to uniformly disparage Michigan?</p>
<p>2) “I guess you are right Alexandre that Michigan’s smartest students are better than NYU’s smartest students. However, the “thickness of intelligence” for UMich student body doesn’t compare to the Ivy League schools who have more National Merit Scholars even though they have a quarter of Michigan’s undergraduate population!”</p>
<p>Facts easily verified via wikipedia and via UM’s web site:
a) More students take the ACT than the SAT;
b) the Ivy interquartile range is 30-34;
c) UM’s common data set shows that 63% of the undergraduate population has an Ivy Leage ACT score above the Ivy League 25% or the lower bound of the interquartile range. With 28,000 students, that indicates that UM has 17,640 students with an Ivy League ACT score;
d) in consequence, UM has more kids on the Ann Arbor campus with Ivy League test scores than Harvard, Yale and Princeton combined.
e) the national Merit scholar thing is overdone because it is a tail even and you don’t use tail events to characterize the thickness or centrality of the distribution.
f) as others have noted, while the Fulbright is also a tail event, Michigan wins that discussion over the last decade: more scholars than any other school;
g) Sloan fellows are also tail events, but UM does very very well in that regard;
h) the endowment is some evidence of student success, and here UM does very well;</p>
<p>“Not when 30-35% of UM students attended crappy Michigan public schools. Unless you think a 3.8 from Cass Tech or East Lansing is equivalent to a 3.8 at Dalton.”</p>
<p>Yet somehow these same kids are also the kids that are serving up the Ivy League level ACT scores…see my other post in this regard: 17,640 kids with board scores at or above the Ivy League level for this test. Further, we know that GPA is a function of institution, but you seem to be suggesting that the UM adcom folks aren’t aware of the nuances behind such GPAs. You also seem to be assuming that the GPA – inherently subjective as a metric – is a more worthy proxy than board scores which are nominally more objective.</p>
<p>“EDIT: few schools in the top 20 US News have a focus on athletics. In my experience, Michigan at #28 is probably the first school where so many students view it as a draw. Relatives at Stanford, Duke and Notre Dame tell me most students don’t even care about athletics – which is surprising.”</p>
<p>I can’t speak for the students, but it is interesting to note that Schlissel, the incoming President and former Brown provost, has noted that Brown, at one quarter or so the size of UM, has just as many student athletes on campus as UM. So UM’s budget is a lot larger and they compete at a higher level, but Brown has roughly 4 times as many per capital athletes as UM. Stanford presents a similar picture.</p>