======================================================================== Advice for young gifties thinking about where to go to college. (last update: 8/22/99 -- Andre' DeHon) Soundbytes: 0) aim high 1) go to the best school right out 2) you can work out the finances 3) ratings aren't the whole story 4) apply widely, avoid statistical fluctuations 5) there are good people almost everywhere 6) LSMSA's reputation helps, but won't carry you [added 9/99] Short Discussion: 0) Aim high -- make a serious effort to apply/attend the best schools you can find in your area. Don't self-select yourself out of the running. I've seen numerous people with the potential who simply didn't believe enough in themselves to shoot for the best the could obtain. 1) Go to best school right out. Don't think you'll go to a lesser school first and go to the better school for graduate study or as a transfer. a) Your student colleagues are an important part of the learning process; you want to be challenged and supported by the best. b) Don't retard your own learning. Much in your capabilities and world view gets set early in your life. Don't handicap yourself or your mind by giving it less than the best possible, the earliest possible. c) Useful recommendations are one of the key reasons not to go to a lesser (lesser known) school first. Selecting students to admit to graduate school is a tough job for faculty. Of course, they'll get letters saying you are great. But if they don't know the professors writing them or the caliber of the students you are being compared against, they have trouble sorting through who really is worthwhile. If you go to a school with a known reputation and work with known prof's in the field, their recommendations can carry real weight--- simply because they are people that the graduate admissions committee knows and whose judgment they know they can respect. d) Even if you are not going to go to graduate school, the entrepreneurial options are greater for those who network at the more prestigious schools. You're more likely to find worthwhile peers to team up on your venture, and your peers and profs. help give you the contacts you need. e) Graduate school (at least in engineering) will almost certainly be paid for by someone else [teaching or research assistanceship or fellowship], so don't think you need to save your money at the undergraduate level to attend a better graduate school. Doing well at a better undergraduate school will better assure that your graduate education is covered by someone else. 2) You can work out the finances. The MIT educational councillor with whom I interviewed told me ``No one from this area has failed to go to MIT for lack of funds.'' Once admitted, I called him on it, and he helped. In the end it was a win-win scenario. I'm sure he got more than his money's worth, and I was debt-free before finishing graduate school. I tell this story not to imply your situation will work out exactly like mine, but to say that I've seen people from all kinds of financial backgrounds; each had their own story; and each found a way to make it work. 3) Ratings alone aren't everything. Especially, differences of a few positions in someone's rating book matters less than other issues. For example, consider MIT and Stanford. Two schools who run neck-and-neck for the #1 slot in computer science and in electrical engineering (and are just a few positions apart for overall undergrad.). From the numbers, they're very similar. Culturally, they are night and day, and that difference should be the deciding factor not the ratings. MIT students pride themselves in being good focussed nerds (and this is a wonderful thing!), while Stanford students pride themselves in "having lives" beyond engineering. (That's an oversimplification, of course, but it's just intended to get you thinking about the right issues.) The most succinct distinction I can give of the difference in philosophies between Berkeley Computer Systems research and MIT's is difference between Gail Wynand's Banner (UCB) and Howard Roark (MIT) in _Fountainhead_. 4) Obviously apply widely. There is quite a bit of noise and variance in the admissions process. You protect yourself by not allowing statistical fluctuation to do you in. 5) There are good faculty everywhere, so even if you don't get into a top 10 school, you can still get a great education and be prepared to move up for graduate school. However, it will require more discipline, work, and selection on your part. One phenomena which you should be aware of is the "spreading" of faculty. The big universities produce most of the PhD's, but only employ a small fraction. Consequently, Prof's with backgrounds from the top schools end up everywhere. In this sense, the variation among students and student culture among schools can be larger than the variation in faculty talent. What you miss at a "lesser ranked" (or teaching/non-doctoral) school is uniform faculty quality, uniform student quality, the strong cultural value of excellence, and facilities. But with work, you can find the excellent faculty members, the best students, and get a great experience out of it. Talk to the experts in your fields about who to look for at these universities (esp. use LSMSA alums who may be experts or practitioners in the field to act as experts or help you identify experts). Returning to the recommendation issue above. If you can work with someone at your university who is known and respected by faculty at the more prestigious schools to which you may wish to apply for graduate school, their recommendation will be meaningful, reducing the problems I detailed above. 6) LSMSA's reputation helps, but won't carry you. Your LSMSA imprimatur can get you serious consideration at many places, but they won't take you just because you're from LSMSA. You still have to show that you are a strong individual who made the most of LSMSA. While you were chosen for LSMSA as the best-and-brightest of Louisiana, for college admissions you are competing against the best-and-brightest nationally and internationally. That puts you up against students from other math and science schools, from some excellent normal high schools, and from dedicated, private college preparatory schools. My experience upon arriving at MIT was not that I was ahead of my peers, but rather that my LSMSA education brought me up to equal starting terms with my peers from around the world. I have been surprised at what is covered in some of the "normal" public high schools outside of Louisiana. Coming straight from normal Ouachita parish public schools, I would have arrived at MIT with a sorely deficient background, and more likely, would not have been seriously considered as an applicant. The benefit of going to LSMSA is not that you get to take college-level courses, but that you get a high-school curriculum on par with the best high schools in the nation so that you are ready to attend the best universities in the nation. ======================================================================== From: "J. Neelis" I would encourage LSMSA students applying for and deciding on colleges to avoid the lures of prestige, and instead try to attend schools where they will be comfortable, content, and intellectually challenged. After graduating from LSMSA, I decided to attend Brown University - an ivy league school in Rhode Island. I think originating from the Deep South helped in the admissions process (my SATs were not high, but I performed well at LSMSA) in an affirmative action kind of way. I did very well academically at Brown, too, but I can't say I really enjoyed the experience, and I am not sure that it was the best school for me to attend. One of the biggest adjustments for me, besides the geographical separation from my family and friends (and everything else familiar), was the extreme difference between my own background (mostly growing up in small or medium towns in South Louisiana) and the economic class of my fellow students. I was told by a Dean my senior year that I had received more financial aid than any other student who had ever attended the institution. Although the finances for college can be worked out, I think LSMSA students from lower and middle class backgrounds should definitely consider the costs involved. Even when financial aid is available, the loan burden of attending an elite private school will be immense (and I am sure it is even more horrendous now). And besides the money, there is inevitably isolation and alienation to deal with. My experiences in graduate school at large public universities (UT-Austin and Univ. of Washington) have been much better, but I can see how life as an undergrad may not be so rewarding. Now I am teaching Sanskrit and South Asian religions at Florida State University. Are there any LSMSA alums living in Tallahassee? We just moved here a few weeks ago, and would like to make contact with the extended network of Gifties. If any of you have lived here, or have attended FSU, please let us know about neat stuff to do and see. -Jason Neelis '86 (Brown BA '90, UT MA '92, UW PhD still happening) ======================================================================== From: "D. Stephen Voss" >1) Go to best school right out. Don't think you'll go to a >lesser school >first and go to the better school for graduate study or as a >transfer. As someone who went from a "lesser school" (LSU) to the top department in my field (Harvard), I want to dissent a bit with this logic: 1) Andre' is exceptional. Few people leave a top school without loads of debt (the only ones I knew were those who started with lots of cash from Mommy and Daddy). Graduate school may be free, but bearing $30,000 in debt restricts one's flexibility. I made a real profit at LSU. 2) As Andre' indicates, faculty at "lesser" schools often have the same training as those in more famous schools. What sets these two groups apart? I promise you, the top ones did not get there from their interest or ability at *teaching*!!! If anything, the fatal flaw in those at lesser schools is they liked teaching too much. 3) The typical undergraduate enjoys very little access to faculty at Harvard. Most of their contact is with teaching fellows. The same appears true at other Ivies, although individual students and individual institutions are exceptions (e.g., I've heard great stuff about Dartmouth). Why pay tons of cash to have me teach you as a graduate student, when you can pay much less for me to teach you at the Univ. of Kentucky after two years' extra experience? 4) Elite schools may have more talented students, but at "lesser" schools the faculty are better able to focus on the ambitious students they do come across. I had tons of faculty access at LSU, and am able to do the same for my top students at UK. 5) The elite schools can be nasty places. They can chew you up. Or they can change you into an arrogant, elitist jerk like me. :) >5) There are good faculty everywhere, so even if you don't get into a >top 10 > school, you can still get a great education and be prepared to move up > for graduate school. However, it will require more discipline, work, >and > selection on your part. Black activists often claim that African Americans have no margin of error if they want to be accepted on "merit," whereas incompetent whites slip through without protest all the time. The same is true with graduates of "lesser" institutions. Regardless of your GPA, your standardized test scores, or your letters of recommendation, most institutions will consider the "prestige" of your degree, and that can damn you. I saw precious few graduates of state schools during my years at Harvard, and barely squeeked in off of the alternate list myself. So I'm not diagreeing with Andre' entirely about the value of an "elite" degree: it conveys concrete advantage, just not for nice reasons. >What you miss at a "lesser ranked" (or teaching/non-doctoral) school > is uniform faculty quality, uniform student quality, the strong >cultural value of excellence, and facilities. Frankly, I think all one misses in the social sciences or humanities is a diploma with lots of snob appeal. The "rankings" (e.g., the NRC, U.S. News) aren't driven by objective measures, just blanket reputation. A poli sci journal recently compiled an objective measure of per capita faculty productivity in our disipline's top journals, and compared those results to the prestige rankings, and the two bore little similarity. The top by reputation were: Harvard, UC-Berkeley, Yale, Michigan, Stanford, Princeton, UCLA, UCSD, and Wisconsin-Madison. The top by productivity were: CalTech, SUNY-Stony Brook, Rochester, Iowa, Houston, Carnegie Mellon, Michigan State, Texas A&M, Stanford, and Georgia. The energetic, ambitious research in political science is simply not taking place at the high-prestige schools. A few stars are there, but you have to fight for their attention with lots of other really smart kids. Steve Voss('86) Temporary Populist -------------------------------------------------------------- D. Stephen Voss, Instructor URL- http://www.uky.edu/~dsvoss 1603 Patterson Office Tower Phone- (606)257-4313 Dept. of Political Science "It was my duty to bring University of Kentucky the facts to light, and there Lexington, KY 40506-0027 I must leave it." Sherlock Holmes -------------------------------------------------------------- ======================================================================== From: "Andre' DeHon" I'm glad to see Jason and Steve's comments added to the mix here. Certainly, they help provide a more complete picture (if not alternate views). One thing, I believe, it makes clearer is the differences between the humanities and social scienes (of which I have little exposure) and the physical sciences and engineering (where I feel most confident in rendering judgment). Steve's comment about more faculty access at smaller/less-elite schools is a good one and is part of what I intended by saying it will take initiative on your part to make the most of the opportunities there. I can't, completely, let the "The elite schools can be nasty places" statement go by w/out comment. Perhaps, this goes to underscore my point about culture and values making a bigger difference than a few slots in ratings. I can believe some "elite" schools can be nasty, I guess I've had the good fortune to avoid them. :-) > graduates of "lesser" institutions. Regardless of > your GPA, your standardized test scores, or your > letters of recommendation, most institutions will > consider the "prestige" of your degree, and that can > damn you. I saw precious few graduates of state At the risk of being too blunt, a key thing that makes a difference in reccommedations is how they value the judgment and assessment of the reccommender. We can all whine and complain about how unfair this may be, but, pragmatically, it matters. They are trying to figure out how *you* will stack up with the students (faculty) at their university. A reccommendation from someone who knows the calliber of students at their university (and whose assessment they feel they can trust) is much more meaningful to them (and carries more weight) than a reccomendation from someone who doesn't. I'd suspect that this "prestige" of the reccommender (on a good reccomendation, of course) carries more weight than the "prestige" of your degree. And, I'd take that into account when considering internships/coops as Scott reccommends. If you're going on in academia, working with (and impressing) someone whose opinion the academics will value can be a net asset. Who are they going to value? -- again, practitioners who will have known the calliber of students they are looking for (so often from the "elite" schools they respect, if you will). As far as I can make out, there is substance to the reputation of most highly regarded schools in sciene and engineering, so this may be a major difference between the physical and social sciences. Andre' ======================================================================== From: "Liudolf Wortterdam" Personally, I've been perfectly happy to put everything on hold and live a little straight out of LSMSA. I saw all of my friends senior year worrying about college monies and things of that sort and I just didn't want anything to do with it, so I accepted a scholarship to USL for computer science and promptly dropped out after half a semester. Since then I've been to Texas to try out a swordsmithing apprenticeship and I'm not working in Naval Intelligence. I might go back to school if I get out of the Navy, but for now I'm not worried about it. I'm still able to explore new intellectual horizons in ways that I wouldn't have been able to bottled up with studies at a college. My course is decidedly not the one for everyone, but I know that some people are overlooking one of the most sane college options available : NOT RIGHT NOW! Jeremy Bordelon '97 ======================================================================== From: Andre' DeHon (7/02) [While all the previous were written in 1999, I wrote this "response" in July of 2002 when I was first assembling this digest. This is one of the things the intervening 3 years has taught me. Otherwise, I still believe the reccommendations I made in 1999. -- andre] Jeremy's point is a good one. Don't go to college because it seems like it's the thing to do. You'll get the most out of it if YOU want to learn -- YOU have things that you are passionate about. Don't go to get a degree---go to get an education. I have now seen many examples of students who aren't really ready for college, and who are doing everyone (themselves, their parents, their university) a disservice in going through the motions. Often it's just a case of maturity---they should really wait and come back when they are older and more ready to learn. The *same* people 2--4 years later will be excellent students. I count my brother as one of them. The first time through college, he wanted to play around. He didn't have anything that excited him or he was passionate to learn about. He got bad grades and exited with an associated degree. Then he worked for a while doing technical drafting. He found something he liked, and he found that he didn't have the knowledge and skills he needed to be anything other than someone else's draftsman...and these guys weren't smarter than him, they just knew some stuff he did not. The second time through college, he had a mission. He had something HE wanted to learn. This time it was fun. The courses were all good stuff (even the math!) that he had a use for. ...and, when you want to learn the stuff, the grades are secondary (but tend to fall into place). He now has a Master's in Architecture and has found a life calling which he enjoys. For another (excellent) description of this phenomena, see Phaedrus' demonstrator in chapter 16 of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsg). Unfortunately, our university system is setup largely to review and accept students right out of high school. I'm sure older students who have taken some time off after high school will have some different challenges with the college admissions process. ========================================================================