Tfw all the best writers went to elite schools with acceptance rates under 10%

>there are people this delusional
>70k a year is good

wew laddie. whatever helps you sleep at night I guess

>trolling this badly

Okay user ┗(＾0＾)┓

>tfw finishing high school
>tfw destined for selective college
>tfw high school was just a game, get the highest gpa and acceptance score
>tfw played it well

The conventional wisdom in your case is not to go to grad school. It's not good for vanity or insecurity because no one gives a fuck about you at all. It isn't high profile or exciting or anything. Also it's disproportionately thankless, low-paying (most go into debt), and stressful compared to other jobs you could be doing. Being a postgrad is a slog that wastes the best years of your life while you remain a manchild. And I say that as a postgrad.

The most important reasons though are that you won't get a job, and that the only way to get through the aforementioned slog is to have some (frankly) neurotic reason for caring about the work. The dean of students told me literally yesterday that the only way a PhD student can get through years 3 and 4, the only thing that gets you through the multiple month-spanning periods when you've lost all interest and hope and purpose, is an effectively pathological commitment to spending your life studying 9 pages of some poet or philosopher.

Don't do it unless you really, really love the subject. That said, insecurity and vanity can help, if they are part of something bigger that makes you willing to squander your life reading books. Nothing wrong with a craving for recognition or narcissistic conceit that you have great ideas, if they help you.

If you think GPA and test scores destine you for any selective school you're sorely fucked

70k a year is thoroughly unimpressive

I used to stress about this really bad at first, maybe five years ago, but realised there are more important things with which to occupy your time and thoughts.

For the first job out of college? That's pretty impressive user, most out of college jobs land you around 50

>implying Rice is on the same tier as Harvard, MIT, Oxford, etc.
>implying St. Edwards is on the same tier as Cornell, Berkeley, etc.

:thinking_emoji:

It's impressive when you're coming out of a tier 3 school :^)

Thoroughly unimpressive if you're graduating from a tier 1/2 school where the bulk of graduates are making 90 - 150k out of college depending on industry/location desu.

>Cornell and Berkley not Tier 1

What universe do you live in user?

thats not true

many great writers were poor, or struggled to make ends meet.

Is it even worth trying to be exceptional lads

serious question, i dont want my ego to ruin my life

Corncob-ell is a safety school. Berkeley is only good as a grad school.

>tfw making $229k as a top-tier CS major fresh out of college during the dotcom boom

It was beautiful. A shame you fags will never experience it.

Tier 1 (roughly) - HYPS, Oxbridge, MIT, Chicago

Tier 1.5 - Columbia, CalTech, UPenn Wharton, etc., specialty schools/subschools of lower ranked schools that are highly ranked

Tier 2 - Minor Ivies, (Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, UC system, top publics (UMich, UVA, etc.), Duke, Johns Hopkins, etc.

Tier 2.5 - NYU, USC, Northwestern, CMU, Georgetown, etc. etc.

so on and so forth.

>implying I haven't got this all figured out by senior year
Managed school radio station for two years, scholar athlete varsity wrestler, 8 AP classes. Any other bases I should cover before I graduate?

is your definition of "tier 1" top 50 or something stupid like that lol.

be black/mexican and you're good. everything else and you're probably not qualified for the best of the best but you'll get in somewhere decent. Every single applicant that the top 3 even look at has the bare minimum of a shitload of APs, a high GPA and good testscores, so don't count on it.

why are americans so autistic about school

you just listed the bare minimum requirements for a tier 1 school to not throw your app out immediately. guaranteed admission is a long ways off amigo. get barack to write your rec letter and then we'll talk.

Do any of you semen demons know if Stanford has a good English/Comparitive lit/Philosophy/Classics undergrad program? I know it's good for STEM, but where do its humanities rank among the other top tier schools?

undergrad rankings are a meme, if you're gonna do humanities stanford is probably one of the best places to do it at

no one is gonna care if -random tier 2 uni- has a "technically higher ranged english program than stanford", they care the name stanford is on the resume

if you have to ask this question though you're prob not getting into stanford, or it's gonna be a long shot. good luck amigo. don't be too upset college admissions are kind of a crapshoot.

What is your definition of selective?

I got a scholarship to a pretty nice school because they thought I was black. Pretty sure at least.

Top ~15 - 20

you underestimate how many
1. perfect GPA + 5 national level competitive extracurricular asians
2. really rich white kids with perfect support systems, referrals, and legacy
3. affirmative action candidates
4. athletic recruits (for high profile team sports, i.e. football, basketball or national/olympic-level individual)

there are taking up spots.

if you have the stats you say you have you can -probably- get a spot into at least one of them, but you basically can't guarantee anything.

>Taught myself calculus in highschool
>Speak 3 and a half languages
>98% percentile SAT scores
>Spent my youth as a flaneur and don't have the grades to back anything I say up
>Don't have money for a good university either
>tfw wasting away in your home town working a shit job while working on different get-rich-quick schemes
>tfw even my watered down opinions tend to be too pessimistic and degenerate for a mainstream audience and anything I wrote would end up hurting me
>tfw zero close friends, few not close friends, all my free time is spent in my head
>tfw dying of boredom

Anyone want to throw down and rent an artist studio in Vancouver or something? If we got 5 or six people together sleeping on the floors we could probably collectively feed ourselves and keep a roof over our heads.

ok thanks, I was just worried because of the reputation of the preponderance of STEM/CS majors on campus and of the dominant STEM culture

>tfw going to elite school (Columbia)
>tfw said school filled with sjws and pseuds
>tfw 60k in debt

Don't worry OP, I went to Cambridge and now I'm a depressed aimless loser. You probably would have been a failure no matter where you went to school.

That's not really that impressive senpai
You're competing with people that've done research or been recognized nationally, you're qualified but only if everyone else mentioned in Like, maybe Berkeley at most is a sure thing. Otherwise you really overestimate your skills and resume

Are you kidding? Vancouver's rent is on the moon.

Status symbol

>man i had the depressions whole life too dude!! fkin suuuuucks
>uhhh yeaaaaaaaaah im pro choice >_>
>what uni u go to oh the harvard good investion like warone buffer and very intellgent and big penis
>communism dont work!! liberal boo !!
>trump wins i go canada!!!!! XD ello mate!
>does god exist ? hmm . . .
Fucking Americans lmao.

It can't be worse than mediocrity

>rice
>tier one

Choose one

>Columbia not tier 1.

Exactly. Fuck living around poor people.

Besides, BC is a melting pot just waiting to boil over. I'd rather make my mark on an emerging international metropolis with barely a hundred years of "history" than some stuffy European city that's become so strangulated by history that art just becomes static in the background.

If the point of art is to re-envision the world, its much easier to do that in an area without any strong ideological competitors and a repressed collective psyche. Vancouver or Victoria is a mosaic of racial and class violence, cultural and social alienation, and sexual repression.

>putting Michigan and Virginia ahead of CMU and Georgetown
State school pleb detected

I was thinking Norte dame, northwestern, or Michigan tier. You're talking about ivy schools friends. I understand how ambitious that is and I'm not a minority or rich. I know I'm at the top of my class somewhere though and I'm pretty confident I'll end up where I should

that's every school except certain liberal arts colleges or weird outliers like NYU

let's put it this way- how many kids are at Columbia who also got into HYPS? very very few. it's an excellent school but it's a hair below the absolute elite

in which case you're probably fine. you should still apply to the Ivies and equivalent because you're. it completely outside the admission range. sometimes people get lucky/they really like your essay/the adcom just learned they all got a raise eight before they read your app. it's literally a crapshoot.

bump up cmu if you want. is only good for CS (where it's competitive for a top 3 spot). Georgetown is most definitely below Uva and Michigan for company recruiting tiering in finance consulting and tech

>tiers
seriously I can't even even right now what the fuck America

most coveted higher education in the world. it is what it is.

Then you'll be ok I guess
I'm applying now for top schools and I'm worried af DESU

For your vanity just apply and get accepted and don't go

You can tell people you got accepted

Well, you're a cancerous frogposter, so it's not like anything you say or write will ever be worth reading.

its worth going

A lot. Their SAT and GPA ranges are exactly the same. Columbia's acceptance rate is lower than that of Yale, Princeton, MIT, and Chicago. I can't understand why Chicago is so highly ranked for undergrad, Columbia is clearly the superior school.

>butthurt his school is considered second tier to haaaaahvuhd