what are my chances at ivy

Gogreen19
Thu, 15 Aug 2019 12:31:28 +0000

@rkalahasty you seem qualified, but I think you may want to think over what kind of undergraduate education you want. You see, Cornell and Penn on your list are all about vocational learning i.e. if you go there to study biology, you will, for the most part, stay within the bounds of biology and take courses related to that for your education. The other schools on your list have undergraduate liberal arts curriculums, which means they like applicants who want a more diverse education, specializing in something but also taking courses related to other fields for the purposes of interdisciplinary education, since that is what the liberal arts curriculum gives to students.

Also, besides that, some schools on your list have decidedly contrasting views on education even within the liberal arts. Columbia and Brown are exact curricular opposites. Columbia’s core curriculum means that a quarter to a third of your courses as an undergrad are decided for you, since the core means that there are a number of courses that all undergrads are required to take. You may like that, or may not, but you should consider it. They have many Columbia-specific courses that I found quite interesting. Brown, meanwhile has the open curriculum, meaning that you have almost no requirements to fulfill and can take courses from multiple fields, building your own concentration of multiple fields you are interested in without having to worry about requirements you may have to fulfill.

Additionally, some of the schools on your list like Harvard, Columbia and Penn are in large cities and, to an extent, have a city-based social life and atmosphere. Others like Princeton and Yale are small city schools, with a more campus-based social life and atmosphere.

These are just things to consider, Which side of any of these factors you prefer will help dictate fit, which is perhaps the strongest factor college admissions officers look at for their decisions. It will also help tell you if some of these schools might be better replaced with other top tier schools that best fit what you want out of a college experience. Also, Princeton and Brown on this list (and to a lesser extent, Yale) are the only ones which are undergraduate-focused. The rest have more of postgrad focus, so small class sizes, participation in research, and close contact with professors would be harder to come by in the latter category.