Ivy League Schools

Ireland here.
We had someone from the Harvard admissions team speak at our school and he's shilling all the Ivy Leagues.
I'm considering applying but I get the impression these Ivy League schools are overrated (except for Cornell). I'd rather go to MIT, Stanford or Caltech (if I could get in) than these places.
Ivy League Schools:
>affirmative action brainlets
>endless useless majors in arts
>full of dudebro chads who bought their way in
Are The Ivies even good schools for STEM? The more I look into them the more overrated these places seem. Any current/former students feel free to comment.

Do your undergrad at a decent, affordable uni with good student research opportunities. Personal experience doing research is much more important than having an Ivy name attached to you BS.

For grad school though, only do top 20.

If you're American could you give me your opinion of Trinity College Dublin? Do you even know of it?

>Personal experience doing research is much more important
This. Education is 90 percent student and 10 percent institution.

>For grad school though, only do top 20.
Wouldn't go that far, but I would say that the institution matters far more for grad school. And the way you ensure this is by referring to the advice above and knocking it out of the park in undergrad.

Thanks anons.

Harvard and Princeton are the only ivies worth going to for education. The rest are fine for networking if that's your prerogative.

agreeing. You'll waste a ton of money and hate every human life within a mile of you if go to any of these places and only be marginally better off for it. Grad school is a totally different story, but if you go to a decent enough place for undergrad and do some good research, you'll be in a very good place.

>Are The Ivies even good schools for STEM
Cornell is. The others not so much.

Hi Ireland
I have a basis that I'm using to make my college decision, OP
I. The courses with the least variation from one institution to another are the most "pure" (see pic)
II. Jobs in STEM are earned primarily on the merit of the applicant(or at least I try to believe this)
III. Tuition is supremely relevant when finding the opportunity cost from one uni to another.
For me, what I get from these three ideas, it makes the most sense to find the most value-oriented schools. Ivy leagues are definitely NOT one of them. I assume you're planning on living in the US after getting your degree (like my Irish brother-in-law, funnily enough).
I take if you're concerned with the name of your school, then a good mix of reputation/cost would be a UC or CSU, or you could attend a community college and transfer whereever you please, potentially saving your up to 100k usd

Russell Group is objectively better, certainly Oxbridge.

I go to Harvard, don't listen to any of the fags here. The experience is amazing and you get amazing opportunities afterward. Plenty of research with the best professors in the world. They're not all the same though, Cornell is good for engineering and hotel management, Dartmouth is meh. The other have their strengths and are good in STEM and humanities.There's a lot of fo chads but they're all smart enough to belong here. Affirmative action sucks, but it's like that everywhere, though it probably is a little worse at the Ivies. Those other schools you mentioned are good, but aren't objectively better or worse than the Ivies. If you wanna do pure STEM and never touch anything else or meet people outside of STEM, then they're probably better.

I can answer any questions about student life and admissions.

> tfw not in Oxbridge
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEe

>For grad school though, only do top 20

Tfw I fucked up and can't go to grad school let alone a top 20.

Cornell, UPenn, Columbia, and Princeton are good at STEM
Harvard is good at CS
Dartmouth is shit at Math
Yale is shit at STEM
idk what Brown is even good at

If you didn't go to Oxbridge, you simply aren't educated.

Do CIA niggs still run MKULTRA experiments on the students like they used to?

Ivy-Alum fag here. Undergrad and PhD in a STEM field. I definitely feel like I got a top-notch education, particularly in research, but the prestige is overrated. Undergrads were mostly a bunch of elitist slightly nerdy frat chads networking with dad's money. But there were some super cool smart people I met too. If I were to do it over again, I would have chosen to have a good time at a small pot-smoking liberal arts college for undergrad, then to a proper tech school for grad school. Or just straight into tech school for undergrad.

Do the CIA niggers still run MKULTRA experiments on the student body like they used to?
On an unrelated note, do you ever stop and take stock of your memories of the past week or so in order to see if your memory is deteriorating for whatever reason? Do you ever find large gaps in your memory?

Don't trust stanford. Definitely not just saying that because I go to berkeley or anything.
But really, it's probably a good option.
Most ivies are fine for STEM. Not great for engineering. I would have gone to Princeton or Harvard over Berkeley but probably not Columbia or UPenn, and I didn't choose Cornell over it. Brown, Yale, and Dartmouth are meme tier for STEM (though I think the Brown math program is pretty cool)

I know that feel. Got shit grades in undergrad. Don't really know how to do grad school from here

The real point of getting into an Ivy is that the name-brand is literally and unironically better than whatever the fuck you're doing in the state school, the b-tier Irish uni, etc, provided you have ambition and want "success" out of life. Oxbridge, the Ivies and sundry French institutions are where you go when you are being groomed (or socializing) with the ruling class of the next generation. That is where the next generation's world-power is concentrated, and if you know some of them, then you have an automatic nepotistic-in to a good job somewhere (humans are social animals and this comes before meritocracy).

I speak the truth. t. person who went to a b-tier American university

Cornell vs Princeton for EE PhD? Only applying to one as I only have money for 8 applications at the moment and have better programs above them.

Plan to apply for an applied physics related specialization (or nearest related specialization) at each one if it matters. I think Princeton has a better physics department, but I'm not sure if that spills over into the EE applied physics areas at all.

I dunno, I get invited to join studies all the time though.
I've never experienced that.

>tfw only decided to do well during the last semester of undergrad and never had a chance to do honors
>tfw have continued to self-study after graduating
>tfw overall gpa is too low for grad school

>I would have gone to Princeton or Harvard over Berkeley but probably not Columbia or UPenn, and I didn't choose Cornell over it
What a fucking horrendous sentence! Learn to write, nigger!

Hi, John

It's called getting a master's. If you slacked off in undergrad with your 3.1, you can make up for it by getting a 4.0 for your master's. Admissions will ignore your undergrad if they see massive improvement. That said, you're probably going to have to pay for it since no one is going to fund a 3.1 student.

What are you basing that claim on exactly? I go to a Russel group Uni, is it really that good?

Any fellow oxgoyim on Veeky Forums?

If it’s just a backup apply to whichever has the higher acceptance rate

Go Russell group in England you plebian

what about a 3.6 EE student?

Ya Russel Group are good but aside from Oxbridge I wouldn't put them on Ivy League tier.
Are they though?

Ummm... what?

Yeah the Russel group is no where near Ivy League nor as indicative of academic quality, the University of Nottingham for instance cannot be compared to Harvard.

True, they're generally the better UK unis (except St Andrews and LSE, which are not members) but it's not quite the 'pedigree' of the Ivy League.

>except for Cornell
Isn’t it a lesser Ivy?

>Trinity College Dublin? Do you even know of it?
Not him. But I know of it and hear it is very respectable

Edit if for us.

Cornell user here.

I'm happy, beautiful campus, very challenging coursework. I am astrophysics, intend on switching to AEP

Cornell is a good place for STEM. I am glad I chose to come here.

On the other hand, I receive no aid (and trust me, my family needs it.)

70k a year is a big hole. Be aware that paying that off may be very difficult. It gives me a lot of anxiety.

I hope so.

>70k a year
Thank fuck I'm not American. I don't care how good the education is, that's just extortion.

That is a meme stemming from the inter-Ivy banter because Cornell was spawned from New York state funds. That causes it to be called a state school despite not being so (the contract colleges for agriculture, vet school etc aren't controlled by the state at all, they just get funded by it) which naturally leads to inferior Ivy label.

North Ireland or Ireland Ireland? Oxbridge will probably be a lot more affordable for you to go to than an Ivy League.

went to cornell. its a mixed bag. there are seven different colleges, each with its own programs and admissions requirements.

engineering and architecture colleges are very competitive. you will work your ass of in either of those college. i studied physics in the arts and sciences college, and it was a lot of work. there were only about 25 physics majors per year. lots of people switched out after the first year.

there are the human ecology, hotel administration, and industrial labor relations colleges which are all fucking jokes. they exist pretty much exclusively to balance the female to male ratio.

so there were kids that studied nonstop and got to work with leaders in various fields as undergraduates. there were people that had class two days a week and frat events 6 days a week.

overall i would recommend cornell for anything stem.

the old money/frat culture is pretty gay, but its probably not as bad as yale/harvard etc.

bro you need to get your fafsa figured out.

paid nothing out of pocket last two years i was there due to need based aid. seriously figure it out. go talk to someone.

studied physics there also. grossman, mcallister, bazarov were my favorite profs.

enjoy it my friend! do you ever go to fuertes?

For stem Ivies are overrated.

If you want to network, there are few better choices.

I have talked to everyone who will listen. It is what it is. I'm in that shitty bracket where I make enough money that I'm not "poor" and therefore don't receive any aid, but I'm not "rich" enough to pay the massive tuition.

Technically, I do get aid from FAFSA - in the form of a 40k loan. No real aid.

And yeah, I go all the time. I'm super active in the club which runs the observatory. Definitely my favorite thing to do there

OP here
I would probably at least get some aid so should I really be worried about tuition?
(live with my widowed grandmother because both my parents are deadbeats and can't take care of me)

Why the fuck are there so many of us here. I've seen so many cornell students on this board. I've probably seen many of you in passing and I'll never know which ones you guys are.

Start a club.

Cornell is big and due to big STEM it has a lot more socially awkward people

How do you afford the tuition? If through scholarships, which ones?

What do you think about finals clubs? Is there intellectual diversity on campus?

There absolutely is no intellectual diversity on campus. It's mind-boggling how they managed to recruit the "most diverse" class ever and yet every single one of these faggots holds, more or less, the same trite beliefs and general outlook.

>university in 2017
are you all seriously fucking retarded?

>For grad school though, only do top 20
Why? Or rather, what are the consequences if I go into a top 50 instead

This is what I feared. Everyone looks different but thinks the same. I wouldn’t have thought it 15 years a go when I went to college but the liberal stranglehold on universities is killing them

The major schools have massive endowments. Alumni donate literally millions of dollars every year. I haven't paid for anything at Princeton.

Unless you have two parents both working decent jobs, you shouldn't have to pay shit for college in the US.

brown is just muh doctors and shit, nothing special desu