marklbucla
Member
No matter what schools are on your list...
I just want to strongly, strongly suggest that you go visit your top choices and spend a day in the life of a student in school x. Take the time to sit in on a couple of classes and even talk to some random students sitting in coffee shops. Also, see how friendly the professors are in the departments you're considering. There are a ton of things about each school that will not be written in any catalog or magazine.
Also, the choice to go to a top notch university isn't always the best one. Do you want to be a big fish in a small pond, or a small fish in the ocean? I don't think I've ever seen it formally written anywhere in publications, but what often happens is schools will competitively curve classes to spread people out. The difficulty of the course will be adjusted so that the average is about a B-/C+, with one standard deviation up will be an A, and one below it will be a D. "It's enough to get a degree from _____, so we want it to mean something when we put out someone with a high GPA." The exception to this rule is Stanford, where GPA inflation is supposedly running rampant. I've heard that around 2/3rds of the class graduate with honors.
One more thing is to consider what your goal as a career is. Unless you've got it in your family, you've done all the research, and you've even taken the upper division coursework, you're probably not certain about what you're going to be doing. For example, at UCLA about 90% of the people who started taking Bio or Chem classes were "pre-med". It took about a year for many of them to realize that it may not have been for them because again, the classes are competitively curved and they realized that they just didn't like the material. No matter how smart you are, if you're not one standard deviation above the average, you're not going to get the A's you need. Another example was an Accounting class I took where the cutoff for a B was a 92%! And keep in mind the level of competition, wherever you consider to go. That was just my experience at a couple of schools, but this is something you definetly ought to be double checking on.
Picking a school where you'd have options in career choices may be a good idea. Your top priority in a NROTC program or even considering an exclusive Military Academy sounds okay, but do you really know if the Navy is something you'd want to do? Have you gone through similar training and visited bases? If you were to decide that you didn't like it, what would you do at the Navy Academy?
There are a number of other things to talk about, so if you have any general questions about the transition, you definitely ought to ask. No matter how seemingly obvious something is, you really ought to check with a counselor or student at the prospect school. Knowing what I know now, I'd have done near everything differently. If I had to leave you with one thing, it's to go to a school where you can keep your options open. Obviously, the economy will make a massive impact on your chosen career and you need to be able to roll with the punches and stay on your feet.
I just want to strongly, strongly suggest that you go visit your top choices and spend a day in the life of a student in school x. Take the time to sit in on a couple of classes and even talk to some random students sitting in coffee shops. Also, see how friendly the professors are in the departments you're considering. There are a ton of things about each school that will not be written in any catalog or magazine.
Also, the choice to go to a top notch university isn't always the best one. Do you want to be a big fish in a small pond, or a small fish in the ocean? I don't think I've ever seen it formally written anywhere in publications, but what often happens is schools will competitively curve classes to spread people out. The difficulty of the course will be adjusted so that the average is about a B-/C+, with one standard deviation up will be an A, and one below it will be a D. "It's enough to get a degree from _____, so we want it to mean something when we put out someone with a high GPA." The exception to this rule is Stanford, where GPA inflation is supposedly running rampant. I've heard that around 2/3rds of the class graduate with honors.
One more thing is to consider what your goal as a career is. Unless you've got it in your family, you've done all the research, and you've even taken the upper division coursework, you're probably not certain about what you're going to be doing. For example, at UCLA about 90% of the people who started taking Bio or Chem classes were "pre-med". It took about a year for many of them to realize that it may not have been for them because again, the classes are competitively curved and they realized that they just didn't like the material. No matter how smart you are, if you're not one standard deviation above the average, you're not going to get the A's you need. Another example was an Accounting class I took where the cutoff for a B was a 92%! And keep in mind the level of competition, wherever you consider to go. That was just my experience at a couple of schools, but this is something you definetly ought to be double checking on.
Picking a school where you'd have options in career choices may be a good idea. Your top priority in a NROTC program or even considering an exclusive Military Academy sounds okay, but do you really know if the Navy is something you'd want to do? Have you gone through similar training and visited bases? If you were to decide that you didn't like it, what would you do at the Navy Academy?
There are a number of other things to talk about, so if you have any general questions about the transition, you definitely ought to ask. No matter how seemingly obvious something is, you really ought to check with a counselor or student at the prospect school. Knowing what I know now, I'd have done near everything differently. If I had to leave you with one thing, it's to go to a school where you can keep your options open. Obviously, the economy will make a massive impact on your chosen career and you need to be able to roll with the punches and stay on your feet.
