While on the topic of colleges, can any graduates of these schools offer any information?

Of your list, I would plump for Pitt.

(i'm applying there btw.)

as for emerson... don't waste your money. it's not really that well regarded, AND it's expensive.

You're interested in English programs, right? Emerson College publishes the excellent Ploughshares literary magazine. It's one of the most highly regarded lit mags in the country, and well worth the subscription price -- $20 for a year (3 issues).

Whether you're interested in the university or not, I'd highly recommend checking out Ploughshares.

I almost went to William and Mary, and it's a great school, too. What finally tipped me away from it was just that I decided I'd rather spend 4 years in Boston than in Virginia. But the William & Mary campus is gorgeous and it's got very good academics.

depends what you want out of the school. you can still get a great education even if you don't have tiny classes with attentive professors. a big school like michigan (which i haven't visited yet, so forgive me if i'm wrong) has the money, clout, and history to provide countless resources for any student motivated enough to take advantage of them. (and i've always been confident that you can come away learning a fuckload more at a large public university than some flailing little private one with no real governing body.)

The school I go to has around 25,000 students. Does that qualify us as big?

If it does, I think the portrayel of big universities that most people are describing is somewhat off. Granted, I don't go to a great, big name school with famous professors, but it's one of the more respected ones in the state. The only classes I've ever had taught by grad students or somebody other than the professor have been a few general education ones in my first two years -- the types of classes you don't care about anyways. Intro to Psychology, Intro to Biology, etc.

As far as my major classes, the English ones (I'm an English major -- what you want to be, right?) -- it's nothing like described in the other thread. I've never had an English class with more than 30 students, and the professors have always been more eager to give personal attention and assistance with essays, research, etc.

Granted, I don't know if my university experience is common or somewhat rare for a school of my size. I just don't want you thinking that if you go to a larger university, you'll necessarily be forced to articulate themes in Kafka in front of a crowd of 200 people.

xpost
gabbneb, otm.
Within large schools, there's lots of area for smaller community so you don't necessarily feel like a fish in the ocean. For example, the English department. Live in a dorm building; you'll see the same hundred or so people every day of the year. You'll ride with them in the elevator and make small talk. I've never felt so much a part of a community in my life as I did my freshman year of college.

Keep that in mind when making your decision. I hated high school.

sounds like it. what's the ratio of undergrad/grad/post-grad (it should say on their website)?

I've lived in Charlottesville my whole life and both my parents work at UVA and I know tons of people who go there. I don't really know what to say but it's a good school etc, but hard to get into classes and taught be TAs a lot. Being away from Charlottesville really makes me miss it though, and it's a nice/beautiful place to live. And people I know who go to UVA all love it and say it's not nearly as bad as the stereotype and most people are basically smart.

If you live in Virginia, financially it would be pretty stupid to go out of state unless they give you tons of money.

Anyway, as posted on a few other college threads, the best way to decide is to go visit the schools and attend a few classes. If they have a program where you can spen d a night in one of the dorms, do that, and talk to everyone you meet. And remember that you can always transfer to another school if you're worried that you'll hate where you end up.

However, they're in the middle of a serious push to raise enrollment and build new facilities right now, and along with that is coming a major, palpable shift in how the school perceives itself, the types of people that make up the student body, and the kind of core values that define the college.

It's still a small school, but minus a lot of the idiosyncrasies that made it an engaging place to study at first. I'm not entirely sure I'd go there again if I were deciding on it now. If you're looking to go there as an undergrad, it's important to know that the growing size of the student body is making it incredibly difficult to get into relevant, interesting classes, since the course offerings have not increased accordingly. Expect to take a lot of crappy conceptual interdisciplinary courses, repeat introductory courses for credit, and find yourself taking erstwhile singing cowboy R3x Tr4iler's TV performance class when you can't fit anything else in.

UVA is way bigger, but I don't know if it's more frat centered. Hanging around there on a saturday night is sorta revolting because there are all these drunk dumbasses in ties, but because it's bigger there are more things to do. And charlottesville is a much more 'fun' place to live so it distracts from the frats. But william and mary doesn't have all the legacy kids like UVA, and I guess the general perception is that as a whole it's smarter and more studious than UVA. but I don't know if that's necessarily true.

Even a killjoy such as myself managed to have a good time there, so I don't think that's strictly true...

After you start taking courses within your major, you will see the same people again, and again each successive semester in new courses. This semester I'm taking 5 courses, and there wasn't a single one in which I didn't walk into the room the first day of class and not have somebody to sit next to who I didn't already know.

In two of my courses, I have a sort of little clique going on with one other guy and 3 girls. We've taken classes together for years, so we have a history together. We all sit together in class, joke around, etc. Don't get me wrong, they're not my best friends, but they are acquantinces.

Just want to point out another way that big universities aren't the terrifying oceans of loneliness you may be inclined to believe.

Oh, and Michigan is a fine school, but the student body is kind of insular (having lived in Ann Arbor for a year and a half). Lots of kids from the East Coast who couldn't make it into Harvard-Yale-etc.

My real advice is to apply to as many schools as possible, that way you can postpone the decision and see if you get any scholarship money.

a) ben stein teaches (or taught) there
b) it's where they held the battle of the network stars competitions

I don't know about "psychotic," but if I were a non-wingnut Jew, it certainly wouldn't be the place for me, unless I had an outsize personality and wanted to spend 3 years of law school training my fighting skills

my dream warm-weather college is Pomona, another place, like Rice, that is highly underrated.

http://law.pepperdine.edu/images/home.jpg

I think Ken Starr teaches there too.

And yeah, in response to haha aaron not everyone WANTS to go to an ivy... I guess my point is that at the end of the day where you decide to go for undergrad won't matter all that much beyond being somewhere you're happy for four years. So, picking a school based on non-academic factors such as location, student body, makes a lot of sense. I went to Kenyon College for a couple years, picked on the basis of it having a good English dept, and was utterly miserable. I transferred to Wayne State Univ in Detroit, which is mostly a commuter public school with a really low graduation rate, but I found the English dept was just as strong and I was much happier being in a big city.

don't say this because the school i'm at now really is a terrifying ocean of loneliness.

i would like to know about the universities of iowa and texas. mostly what are their cities like? i might apply to one of them for law school.

UT-A is a very good law school, and Iowa is rather good as well. but are you sure you want to go somewhere where a significant majority of students come from in-state (80% at UT, 60% at Iowa, but i'd bet a fair amount of the balance are from Illinois and Wisconsin).

are you considering Michigan, Cornell and UCLA?

(xpost - Aaron may not be otm for everyone, but he's otm for a lot of people. Math may be better law school prep than poli sci or english.)

i think i am applying to cornell, maybe michigan. also BU, GWU, washington u. in st louis, u. of washington, minnesota, ohio state, maybe berkeley. my list isn't really set in stone yet. by the end of this week i will probably have most things sent in though. i'm afraid i won't get in anywhere! i'm leaning away from iowa, i was just curious. texas seems like it might be ok, but i don't really like hot weather or the south in general. i've heard good things about austin, that it was not like the rest of texas, so i thought maybe i should think about it since it's a good school.

i feel less ready to get a job than i do to keep going to school. we'll see about that, i guess.

i'm providing caveats, but iowa is as good or better than most of the places on your list there. i wouldn't cross Michigan off on the theory you won't get in. if you have any desire to work in NY, you should apply to Fordham, a very good school.

remember that Austin is in neither the Southern part of Texas, nor the plains part, nor the Western part, but in the river-and-lake-oriented Hill country, with a climate that is milder (comparatively speaking - the long Summer will still be very hot). my understanding of what makes it good is that it has a bit of a distinctive native culture that is essentially a small town feel turned weird by lingering university grads, who prop up a bookstore and live music scene, in combination with a fast-growth high-tech culture and the State House.

The political culture gets a progressive rep, but in reality it's not that much more liberal than other major Texas cities (Dallas has a huge African-American population that's going to trend it Democratic in coming elections, San Antonio's fairly liberal).

Other Texas law schools that come to mind:
SMU - not well-respected, but connections out the ass. It's like a good old boy Ivy system.
Texas Tech Law - out in the middle of nowhere (Lubbock)
Baylor Law - I think a lot of Texas prosecutors and small-town judges come out of Waco.
University of Houston Law - feeds into the oil industry

The only law school worth moving across the country for, unless you're itching to live in Texas, is probably UT.

All I can say is that, at my law school, 99% of the people who came here straight after undergraduate have to deal with the moment of utter "oh shit why am I here and having no life sucks!" Having worked a number of years before starting law school, I too have to deal with this, but I'm better prepared to shrug my shoulders and just keep pressing on. I guess that gabbneb and me are saying that if you're not exactly sure what you want to do with your life (and the point is that EVERYONE isn't sure what they want to do with their life after finishing undergrad), that working for a couple years gives you a bit of breathing room to figure it out. Plus, as I said, it won't hurt your career because a) you're better prepared for law school and b) employers like to see work experience.

That's my sage advice at least! Oh, and math definitely is good prep for law school and the LSAT. All us English majors struggle to write succinct sentences free of adverbs and adjectives. Oh, and I have mixed feelings about Fordham (although that might have to do with not getting accepted there).

i've heard great things about ohio state. and columbus is a fun little town.

there's no rule that says prestigious schools can't be underrated, as a general matter, even if they are highly rated in particular communities. 15 years ago when NYC wasn't a theme park and most non-college-obsessive people West of the Hudson had never heard of Columbia, it was underrated too.

x-post

Hey, what about my current school? Catholic represent.

I thought of a counter to my law school theory, though; if you have to be studying all the time, do you really have time to run around doing internships and isn't that what summers are for, and maybe you would be better of in the middle of a cow field if that is the type of place that you work best?

i don't work well in a cow field, no way.

well, i do have a preference for research universities over small colleges, but if I have an Ivy League preference, then why would I strongly consider taking any of Pomona, Rice or Chicago over any of Princeton, Penn, Dartmouth, or Brown? just because they're ivies doesn't mean they aren't really among the best schools in the nation.

i mean, sure you can very well get a top-flight education at any of at least 40 or 50 schools (and it's quite possible at many others), but once you're looking at that smaller set, i'd say it's likelier in a first tier of the top 15-20, and pretty much all of the Ivies make it into that group. my preference is a marginal one, but that's the nature of any non-casual college choice.

i couldn't find a thread to post this question on

what is the canadian equivalent of a uk upper second degree and a third class degree?