BF2S Forums College discussion thread

Well my favourite physics prof is easily Burch, you wouldnt have had him though as he does QM.  TrackOne takes the hardest courses of the core 8 and puts them together, then in second year you get to choose whatever one you want to go into (which is why first year is EngSci > T1 > Core8.  I didnt like the engineering program all that much (people, courses, atmosphere) and had more of a passion for the new and experimental and engineering is basically the opposite of that.  So I switched into physics.

This is Burch - he's great at breaking complex ideas down and explaining them piece by piece with analogies.  Amazing professor and a super friendly, smart guy

I got accepted to NYU out of high school but couldn't afford it. Thanks a lot Obama.

Cybargs wrote:

Macbeth wrote:

I got accepted to NYU out of high school but couldn't afford it. Thanks a lot Obama.

You wouldn't fit in there anyway, you can't join all the ivy reject rich kids events.

does NYU qualify as an 'ivy reject' school? it's pretty good. though saying that if i went to grad school on the east coast (which 99% i won't), it would probably be somewhere like yale/colombia/cornell. what's the deal with NYU getting a bad rep? i thought it was a decent school. although saying that there are really just way too many good choices in that area.

Macbeth wrote:

I got accepted to NYU out of high school but couldn't afford it. Thanks a lot Obama.

oh and why didn't you go to something like SUNY bing/stony brook? aren't those affordable? how do the CUNY colleges rank? i don't know anything about it. internationally you tend to only read about/get recommended to the ivy institutions.

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

Macbeth wrote:

I got accepted to NYU out of high school but couldn't afford it. Thanks a lot Obama.

oh and why didn't you go to something like SUNY bing/stony brook? aren't those affordable? how do the CUNY colleges rank? i don't know anything about it. internationally you tend to only read about/get recommended to the ivy institutions.

My parents cut me off after high school so I had to go to a safety safety school while working. Only recently have they started to pay literally all of my bills. Still going to SUNY wouldn't have been worth it. Would be paying about 4,000 more for the same education I get at Rutgers. Would have been a major pain in the ass going into NYC too.

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

Cybargs wrote:

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

does NYU qualify as an 'ivy reject' school? it's pretty good. though saying that if i went to grad school on the east coast (which 99% i won't), it would probably be somewhere like yale/colombia/cornell. what's the deal with NYU getting a bad rep? i thought it was a decent school. although saying that there are really just way too many good choices in that area.

Not saying it's a bad school, but it's not exactly "first choice" for a lot of students with the same academic abilities. A lot would rather go to an Ivy League school, but the tuition at NYU (60kUSD a year...) is out of budget unless you're upper-middle class.

From the people I know that went to NYU (5) all of them were rejected by ivy leagues. They went there because 1) they have the money 2) it's still a pretty good school. One girl I know got a 30k a year scholarship for NYU but she went to UC Berkeley instead.

hmm, interesting. people are spoilt for choice in that area of the states, though. if you have a decent college budget i see no reason why you wouldn't go to one of those large, well-respected unis. there are tonnes of them, and a lot of them have pretty decent acceptance rates, too. over here anything in the top25 is like a <10% acceptance rate (made worse by the fact the system only allows you to apply to 5 unis in a year. wat). loads of the larger and still prestigious unis in the US are way more favourable. seems like the main requirement is if you can pay. that always sucks.

... and your friend made a good choice. i'd prolly rather go to berkeley than NYU, but hey what do i know, i've never been the west coast. my top choice out there would probably be stanford. but it seems like it's in a bit of a cultural armpit.

You can apply to as many schools as you want in the US, as long you're willing to fork out the 10 dollar per college SAT score and 60 dollar application fee PER school.

There are a lot more choices than NYU for the same level of academic reputation for around the same marks to get in, but that "OMG ITS NEW YORK" appeal really gets to people (like my ex). One of my friends who went to NYU transferred out to UT Austin coz he figured out he didn't like New York.

Living in NYC sucks unless you have a lot of money or are white. When I was 18 I would have jumped on it but a 5 year older and smarter me would rather live in Tampa (my planned spot after college).

It is one of the most segregated cities in America. I don't have a problem with that if it wasn't for east coast liberals going on about how tolerant and enlightened they all are all the time.

that's what being on the wrong side of the bridge gets you.

Cybargs wrote:

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

i see. i don't know the geography or costings involved all that well, but i don't really find living in NYC itself all that cool, either. it's so complicated trying to apply to american colleges from abroad, because there's no centralized service (like we have here). every college is like its own smorgasbord of funding and bursary application. and every college charges.

You should see if Common App does post-grad stuff. But American uni's seem to have a hard on for personal statements and extracurricular activity. Good luck getting into a top uni without having at least 150 hours sunk into community service.

uh i can pretty much go to whatever school i want. it's PhD. you need to be a top-class researcher. they don't really care if you've helped the homeless when you're applying for a doctoral research placement. it's a professional degree for the academic career ladder. why  would you think they need extra-curriculars? that's kind of silly. maybe for an undergraduate placement, or a competitive taught masters. but research is 100% about your proposal and your academic references/recommendations. what matters about the institution you choose is: a) there is a specific member of staff (or several) who cater to your specific area of research; and b) that you can demonstrate why that institution's facilities, benefits, and help etc. are particularly relevant to you. that's it.

i've heard stories about people being turned down for PhD applications just because they had a real job for a few years, because the time spent in another work environment, with different professional standards/practices, supposedly makes academics 'rusty' and they're afraid it'll take them too long to readjust to to individual-style of study and formal writing. i dunno why they'd ask you to have spent a few hundred hours doing community service...

Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-04-20 07:52:21)

UofT and mcgill are decent. mcgill probably more so for the humanities stuff than toronto. most american universities are better than most canadian universities. and some american colleges can afford to charge loads because they are completely private institutions. isn't canada's uni system centralized?

uk has (had) the best fee-paying system*. every university was like $8k a year, no matter what level/quality, uniform across the board. it has been tripled now, but it's still fairly standardized and affordable for everyone (relatively, anyway). the funny thing about the UK system is that most people who end up going to the top universities went through a private education system pre-uni that was like $60k a year... for 5-6 years. lol. so the uni fees look ridiculously cheap. i stopped taking parental financial help when i went to university, because 2 degrees for me cost less than 1 year at my 'high' school. lol.

*although 'best' is of course 'worst' if you're an idealist. university in several european states is completely FREE.

Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-04-20 09:36:19)

Jay wrote:

Nyte wrote:

How come schools in the US are soooo much more expensive than Canada???  I keep hearing numbers between $50k-150k (some are PER YEAR).

In Canada, the most expensive I've heard was probably $20k a year for an MBA...  My 4 year Engineering degree cost me < $40k.  And the degrees themselves are worth just as much (if not more) than the ones in the USA (at least the ones at UofT are, not the lesser-known Canadian universities).

Private universities and colleges cost a lot. State universities and colleges do not.

The difference is one is subsidized by tax dollars and the tuitions are minimized due to mission and political pressure while the others charge whatever they can get away with. Supply and demand.

not really supply and demand though, is it? the overwhelming demand is obviously for places at highly-prized institutions - that is the very reason why they are 'competitive'. it's more like prestige pricing... positioning an ivy league university education as a social marker, a 'Veblen good'. it has nothing to do with supply and demand curves. the top universities price themselves at a high-rate for the very reason that the demand outstrips all supply, and they are offering something purposefully scaled for scarcity and hence 'value'. all the ivy league institutions make more than enough money to boost the size of their undergraduate classes, especially places like princeton/yale... but each year they have big arguments (which win) in favour of keeping the class sizes small. limited supply -> inflate price -> perceived reputation and elitism increases.

it's a good job the US private institutions have so many bursaries and scholarships, otherwise it would literally be the same as the english system was, circa 1750... finishing schools for the already rich and privileged.