The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
College Advice
Beril
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I am interested in many fields(biotech, physics, medicine, law, politics, computer programming, art, and video game design), and have good enough grades, test scores, and extra-curriculars to basically get into the college of my choice. The problem is I don't know which field is the best to go with, or which college to go to. If I go into law or medicine I'm devoting my life to one field, more-or-less, but I really like computers, art, and science. What colleges are the best for each field and what are they like? Hell, what are the fields even like? Any and all advice on the matter would be extremely appreciated.
Beril on
0
Posts
Taking a class or two in each of the things you're interested in will help you eliminate some of them, or realize you're more interested in one more than the others. In most universities you don't even have to declare a major until your third year.
BF3 Battlelog | Twitter | World of Warships | World of Tanks | Wishlist
The most important thing to remember is that, under most circumstances, you don't need to be absolutely set on your major going in. It helps to have a general idea of what field you'd like to go into (Engineering, Science, Arts, etc.) as most colleges usually have a semester of "intro" courses that give you more of a broad introduction to a field. It can also help you determine if you're actually in the field you want to be in.
That said, I'm an anthropology major so I only have hearsay to let you know about some of the programs you're interested in:
Video game design is a horrible major unless you are 100% sure its what you want to do (judging by it being only one of your options, it probably isn't). Like medicine and law, it is a highly competitive major that encourages the worst in you to get ahead of your peers. Also, if you want to do video game design, you'd be better off getting a programming/comp sci degree instead, as it qualifies you for a wider set of jobs. If you want to go into medicine (and law is like this, too) most people get bio undergrad degrees, but, as a shameless plug, medical schools love anthro majors (mostly because it's not bio).
Art is.. well, art. If it fulfills you, go for it, but don't expect to make a lot of money.
Physics and biotech are two majors i don't have many friends in, so i'm not sure about those. I do know that biotech will almost certainly require upper level chemistry, a lot of which is seen as a 'weeding out' means to get people who really want it, into the program. Physics also has a course like this, but it's more of a block between undergrad and grad, i think the course is called real analysis, and its an upper level proofs class.
Also, law and medicine are not majors, so that's not an issue. They're graduate schools that you can enter with any other major from college...i.e., you can major in Computer Science and go to law school or med school as long as you take the required classes (typically a few biology classes, organic chemistry, genetics, and some others).
It'd also help if you can be a bit more specific in terms of what you're interested in. What do you like about computers? Or what about physics do you like?
Law is a dead end unless you can get into an Ivy League school or Stanford. Basically, there are too many law schools and too many grads, which is forcing wages down, but tuition keeps rising, and the debt load of a law school will fuck you over in the long run. If you can get into one of the great universities as an undergrad and you do well enough on tests to ace the LSATs law is a good idea, otherwise, only if your parents can pay for your education.
Medicine gives you a solid career for the rest of your life as long as you’re at least marginally intelligent. And as an American doctor you’ll be in good shape to go anywhere in the world later in life.
Computers are great, but you will get worked to the bone while you’re young and if you don’t get into management or a good specialty by your mid thirties you risk getting pushed out and becoming unemployable as you get older. But as long as you plan ahead you’ll be fine.
Art is a insane. Going into art to try and earn a living is about as strong a plan as trying out for American Idol and hoping to make top 3. Only go into art if you have a driving passion, rich family and friends, and aren’t ashamed to blow New York gallery owners. And swallow. No joke.
Science has great job prospects. Just remember not to get a grad degree in a faddish specialty field, those jobs tend to have dried up by the time you get out.
Pre-law and pre-med are absolutely majors.
To answer your questions Grungebox: I like the coding/programming, building, and applications used to make things(by which I mean Zbrush, Solid Works, Illustrator, Photoshop), and Physics I'm fascinated with because of its governance of the natural world and the universe as a whole. Theoretical physics on a micro-(I guess a tad smaller than "micro" because I'm thinking on the level of atoms, quarks, and all the other tiny bits) and macro-scale (because "Space", maybe alternative versions of space if some theories are right, "{is} the final frontier).
@Supabeast: My income bracket is such that, as long as I apply for financial aid when I get accepted, I can go to any school. In fact, Stanford is one of my top choices right now.
I host a podcast about movies.
Awesome. Go spend four years in the paradise that is Palo Alto. You’ll have to go somewhere else for grad school, so you might as well do the long haul in the place with nice weather. Go the tech route and get yourself into the startup scene. Play your cards right and you might be a multi-millionaire by the time you’re twenty-five.
What I would suggest is:
1) For your BA go to a local, state institution. It will be less expensive and for your BA it really makes no difference.
2) Major in something marketable and minor in something you like. You can get into a Master's program with a minor, but you usually can't get a job with a minor. If you plan on doing anything that requires a MA or PhD make sure you have something profitable to help pay your way through those degrees.
3) Being fascinated with something and getting a degree in it are two VERY different things. One is your hobby, the other is the thing you must rely upon to eat for the rest of your life. You want to ensure your degree is focused upon making a return investment on the money you are putting into it long term. Plan ahead and send your feelers out in your freshman and sophomore year. By your Junior year settle with what you want and get through and graduate.
Remember, college is job training, not a party town or high school 2.0. While having fun is definitely part of the experience, make sure it is a perk, not the bread and butter of it. You are paying a LOT of money to get a better job for the rest of your life. Don't waste it.
Plan ahead.
The key thing an Ivy-level school gives you is a pool of high-end contacts. It's way easier to walk onto a job at the hot startup when your buddy is running it, or your friends father is the VC guy.
Yeah for real. If I could change anything in my life, I would've done better in HS so I could have gone to Stanford or MIT. The dropoff in the networking potential after that point is pretty severe, even among the other Top 10 schools in my field.
If you don't want to do engineering and want to get rich, bend the next 4 years of your life towards getting into Harvard MBA. My school hosts a series of speakers every year, typically executives from major companies - I'd say at least 60% of them have Harvard MBAs.
You don't have to decide right away what you will do for the rest of your life. There is an illusion that everyone but you knows the answer to this question, and somehow you just can't get anyone to give you the secret. But the truth is, very few people really know what they want to do in life, and fewer still are able to pursue that thing profitably.
But that's ok! Take some classes, see if something strikes you, but also get involved. The stuff you do outside of class, like groups and volunteering. As well as the internships you do in the summer will flesh out your resume, so that when you graduate you will actually be able to get a job that you could not have gotten just out of high-school.
Enc, if you read the OP's follow up post, you'll see that he will be a financial aid recipient. Selective private schools have much better financial aid than bottom-rung state schools. If somebody's paying full freight there may be an argument for not doing a great private school, but that isn't the case here.
Branch out at the beginning -- take a few electives to get a feel for what you might like to do, but make sure you also are taking things that are pre-req's to what you think you might want to do later [calc, physics, etc].
That's actually not always the case. Many private institutions drop substantial coverage in the details, such as "miscellaneous fees" which can often run several hundred dollars per credit hour. In addition, most do not cover housing with their usual financial aid opportunities and the communities around these schools can be notorious for price gouging.
This is not to say they don't have merits. They certainly do. Just not often and certainly not in every field.
This is a legitimately good counter here, but depending on the field you may be just as likely with a regional school. It really all depends on what field the OP settles on. Especially in Business, PreLaw, and PreMed Ivy league gives you a huge advantage. In most other degrees, the difference is often not substantial enough to justify the costs.
If you have a chance to go to MIT and you want to work in a very specialized field, you would be a fool not to go. If you want to do Computer Engineering you can go most anywhere and there wont be a substantial change with just the BA. Now when you get to masters and docorate levels, Ivy League makes a HUGE difference.
This is terrible advice and the reason student debt is so high. Plan ahead and minimize your BA. In that "extra year" you could be halfway through a masters degree or a year into an entry level job on the way up to proficiency in a field, rather than a few thousand more in debt as your financial aid runs out as you go over the standard allotments (which tend to only cover approximately 3.5 years by credit hour).
If the difference is something you want to do vs. something you don't, it's absolutely worth it. A lot of people feel "Locked in" after Sophomore year, but in the grand scheme of things, retooling while you're still in school is not that hard vs. doing it another time. I did an extra year and got an extra degree, which adds marketability as well.
Not everywhere. They weren't at my school.
When I graduated from high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do either. The approach I took when I started my undergrad was to use the leeway I had from a crapload of credits from AP exams and other stuff I had done to take a bunch of classes in things that I thought might be interesting until I found something that stuck. After 3 semesters of being undeclared, I ended up with a BS in psychology and a minor in religious studies. Since I graduated (which I did in 4 years), I've gotten my Paramedic license and been accepted to med school, which I'll be starting next month. If you're taking a decent number of AP exams, you might have some similar flexibility in your early semesters to try some stuff out.
IMPORTANT NOTE: My approach isn't something I would recommend for everyone. I'm the kind of guy who needs to try stuff out to see if I really like it, and doing that has worked out really well for me. It has risks, obviously, but for me, it was the way I needed to approach my education to help ensure that I ended up in a field I liked instead of being stuck somewhere that made me miserable.
Enc, i'm not sure what you're talking about. http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/financial_aid/hfai/index.html is becoming industry standard for selective privates - if you are low-income, you have an EFC of zero. Selective private institutions don't build in "hidden fees", and they all cover housing with their financial aid opportunities. I don't know where you are getting your information from, I don't think it's right, but correct me if i'm wrong. Where is it you're a counselor at? Is it at some bumfuck community college? You're getting a skewed sample set of people applying to DeVry or something.
EDIT: The HFAI page I linked to is not clear on this point, but the sub-$60k income cutoff means an EFC of zero with zero loans. See http://www.fao.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do.
The last part of that is the rub. Often Textbooks, miscellaneous fees, housing, and more will not be provided and will be substantially more expensive than at their regional public counterparts. This is not always the case, but I've heard plenty of horror stories from students and parents about such things, and have seen them at our private schools (not just the shady for profit jobs, but the established and respected institutions).
I could very well be wrong about the top ten, but for the established ones in my state (Florida) that's universally the case.
I can agree with you here, but it's still better to be focused to start with on what you want and stick with it.
A major regional university in Florida with enrollment over 40,000 a year. Big school, big pool of experiences. Not the best school by far, but I'm pretty aware of the pros and cons of the overcrowded state systems. Getting in and out is usually the best thing for a BA in my experience, with being more selective in your MA and PhD being a more valuable return on your monetary investment.
You miles may vary though.
OP, if you can visit schools you're looking at to see if you like them. If you really want to experiment in different fields then you might consider attending a liberal arts school like Amherst.
The best thing about a place like Stanford is that nearly every faculty in every department will be great, and so if you decide you want to do x instead of y you won't have to worry about whether x is a good department or a good idea. With many state schools, or even some liberal arts schools, some will be good at certain things and some at other things, so you need a bit more of an idea going in as to whether that school is actually good at whatever it is you want to do. Obviously this is dependent on the school (Berkeley, for example, is a state school that's also pretty much great at everything), but something to consider for comparing schools.
Outside of fields where the name on your diploma matters (which is maaybe pre-law/pre-med?), the other main advantage is extracurricular things - the real value of going to a Stanford/MIT/etc isn't the classwork (though it'll be challenging and usually well-taught), it's the opportunities you'll have there to do things like lab research (for biosciences), have connections to startup companies (for business/engineering), etc, which may be more difficult to get elsewhere. Definitely not impossible, but perhaps not encouraged as much or as easy to get involved in.
It really depends on what you're looking for, though - if you're going to collage with the goal of going to classes, getting a degree, and having fun and interesting experiences, then
My other recommendation is that when you're looking at fields, you want to make sure that you consider not only what's the most fun at the time, but also what will set you apart. Video game design is a good example - although you can do a degree in that, you may actually be better off (if you can successfully do it) with a degree in a more basic field like CS, which will give you a broader base to work off of, and you can then sell yourself as not just someone that wants to do X, but that you also understand Y and Z. Biotech is similar in some ways - instead of doing something broad, if you do an undergrad in engineering and then go look for a biology lab to do a PhD in, you can provide a unique skillset that differentiates you from everyone else - i.e., they'll all be good at asking biology questions, but you're the only one that can actually build a prototype of a machine that allows asking a new question.
(disclaimer - my school history gives me a bias about some of these schools)
Doing art for a living is only possible if you have the skills for it - in the end, a degree in Art really doesn't matter. Learning how to be a successful artist takes many, many years of skill-building in a number of areas. Different kinds of industries are also going to be looking for entirely different skillsets, styles, and software knowledge. Graphic design, illustration, game art...etc. The art industry as a whole is pretty competitive, and I'd suggest you take a real hard look at your own skills now, and how hard you're willing to push yourself over the next few years (especially if you feel you have a lot to learn) to see what it would take for you have a competitive edge in the field you're interested in. Compare yourself to professionals and industry veterans, see where you can improve.
Art is hella fun, but it's a pretty big commitment if you want it to be your career. Enjoying art as a hobby does not always translate to earning money as a working artist. There's also the bit about how you have to understand you'll virtually always be taking direction from somebody in what you're creating, so make sure that's okay with you, too.
I'm not saying it's not possible, but I've seen a loooot of people think "art will be fun! I want to be an artist!" and then go to school for it...rack up an insane amount of debt, while sitting around getting A's and B's on their projects and not realizing that they're still incredibly behind in what the industry is looking for. If you go for art, just work hard on your projects and even harder on learning and practicing on your own time. Be receptive to feedback and critique, and never settle on your current skills - always work towards improvement.
I have no idea what financial aid statements that you are looking at where housing isn't provided for.
Here, look, from Pomona college (harvard is the same but I've no east coast bias):
http://www.pomona.edu/administration/financial-aid/faqs/cost-of-attending.aspx
Tuition $ 41,120
Fees 318
Room and Board 13,526
Books 900
Personal Expenses 1,150
Total $57,014
If you go through their calculator, you'll see if you're low-income all of the above costs are paid for: http://www.pomona.edu/administration/financial-aid/index.aspx
Every institution's financial aid package contemplates housing. It is emphatically not the case that "Textbooks, miscellaneous fees, housing, and more" are unaccounted for in financial aid packages. It may be that people don't get enough financial aid to cover those costs, but every financial aid offer and cost of attendance sheet I've ever seen for a private university lays out all the costs. There's no shell game going on and schools provide for those costs. If you are telling your students not to apply to private schools for reasons of cost you are doing them a disservice, as there is no way of doing a cost-benefit analysis until you actually look at the financial aid package you receive.
You note that you "have seen them at our private schools (not just the shady for profit jobs, but the established and respected institutions)." I took a quick peek at US news and found only one Florida university in the top 100 universities and top 100 liberal arts colleges, and that was University of Miami in Coral Gables in the 30s. UF is #58 and New College is in the 80s.. So, at least for purposes of our conversation, Florida doesn't really have any established and respected private institutions, especially for non-Floridians. Sorry for all the Florida hate, but i'm really opposed to your advice as it applies to the caliber of schools OP are looking at, and would encourage you to reevaluate the advice you give to others as part of your job.
If the choice is between a crappy private school and a UF, UF is the clear winner. If the choice is between Stanford and UF, Stanford is the clear winner. If it really was a a $200,000 Stanford education versus a $40,000 UF education, UF would probably be a better choice unless you knew you wanted to do something renumerative and prestige-sensitive like high-end compsci, investment banking or public policy work, but what this thread is trying to get at it's that, regardless of sticker price, it is almost never a choice between a $200k Stanford degree and a $40k UF degree.
I've been doing the "net price calculators" for a few colleges, and it, according to these estimators, would be about as expensive for me to go to someplace like Stanford as it would be to go to a state school.
On the note of state schools, I live in Texas and we've got some pretty good schools (that I have automatic admission into due to my class ranking), if for some reason I can't get into one of these oh-so-prestigious institutions, where would it be best to go for any of these areas of study.
I started college as a Psychology major and at the end of the year I switched to Biochemistry because I like Chemistry a lot. I would take some science courses and see what interests you the most.
I will tell you this, Biochemistry is a lot of work. If you ever do decide to take Organic Chemistry prepare to study a lot. It is doable though.
The worth of your undergraduate degree (with a few notable, highly specific exceptions) won't be affected much by where you attend undergrad, aside from name recognition. Stanford is a great school, but is their (say) undergraduate art department much better than the one that exists at lots of other undergrads? Probably not, and if you actually do want to go into law/medicine/stuff that requires higher mathematics, grad school will be where you make your bones anyway.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat