If you could get into any university you wanted (tuition is not an issue), what would you choose and why?

Not American

School wrote:

Just a hypothetical question. I'm asking you that if you could go to any school you wanted, which one would you go to? The base assumption is that your tuition would be covered.

ah I stand corrected I thought you meant teaching not fees

Why do you all call University school?

Arizona State - lots of sunshine, lots of hotties, lots of revealing outfits.

Ho Hum wrote:

I'm an Northeasterner and I'd still say Stanford. It'd be just as hard as my current school, but more well-known and without shitty winters. I kind of wish I'd applied there, actually. MIT sounds miserable unless you're a certain kind of person, which I am not.

where do you go to now? it sounds like my school maybe

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Animal House.

DocLove wrote:

Why do you all call University school?

Because they are the same?

Caltech - MIT with a lot better weather. Visit nearby UCLA to get girls.

MIT for me wrote:

I didn't go there, but from what I hear, MIT is the real deal - no fluff factor. It is hard as anything, and the students absolutely love the challenge. If you can survive MIT, you can survive any program. The running may be D3, but the academics are amazing.

Nice to see so much love for my school here. Stanford is awesome!

animal house = Dartmouth.Look it up

John Belushi's Ghost wrote:

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Animal House.

athlete wrote:

Caltech - MIT with a lot better weather. Visit nearby UCLA to get girls.

Wouldn't the "girls" at UCLA have some say in whether you "get" them?

MIT for me wrote:

I didn't go there, but from what I hear, MIT is the real deal - no fluff factor. It is hard as anything, and the students absolutely love the challenge. If you can survive MIT, you can survive any program. The running may be D3, but the academics are amazing.

I was an undergraduate at MIT. I think that this is a pretty accurate assessment of the place. It's definitely not for everyone, however. To thrive academically at MIT, you need to have a real passion for the work; otherwise, the place will just eat you alive, no matter how bright you are.

MIT was my top choice for undergraduate studies, and it was a reasonable choice for me at the time. As I learned more about myself and my interests, however, it seemed a less than ideal fit. Harvard, where I was a law student, felt more comfortable for me overall. Although I have enormous respect for MIT -- and I still think that it's the best school in the world for those with a certain combination of aptitudes and interests, or those whose sights are focused on certain academic areas -- Harvard would probably be my top pick if I were choosing a university without having any specific course of study in mind. All in all, it's a pretty cool place to be a student, find one's academic niche, and pick up a degree or two.

I understand the attractions of some of the other schools that have been mentioned, but I don't think that they would have been better for me. Of course, one never knows how any choice is going to work out. You pick a path and try to enjoy the journey.

Neil Armstrong

MS Aeronautical Engineering

University of Southern California

Harvard Med. Pretty self explanatory, right?

So what, there's been millions of medical doctors, but there will only be one "1st Man on the Moon", and he's a USC Trojan.

probably a Pac 10 school; Oregon, Cal, Stanford or USC. I say Oregon for the running, but i hate the weather, so that's off...

Cal: b/c my grandfather went there, and I grew up minutes away

Stanford: for the running only

USC: so much cooler than UCLA

Going with USC now. 29 NCAA Titles | 193 NCAA Individual Champions | 988 All-Americans | 165 Olympians | 42 Gold Medals

phenomenal school. I hope to send my son there. (this may be a real life question for him: i get tuition remission as I work at a private so-cal university, and he could attend USC free of tuition. room & board? that's another story).

You keep saying that USC has had more Olympic marathon medalists and winners of major marathons than any other school. Offhand, the only world-class marathoner I've been able to think of with any connection to USC is Toshihiko Seko, who was at USC for less than a year when he was a kid, and who did almost no running when he was there. Who are all of these great marathoners from USC?

Also USC alums are #1 in major Marathons wins !

Avocado,

May I ask what you studied? Also, you didn't by chance consider Yale, Princeton, Williams or Georgetown did you? Looking for some insight.

At MIT, I received degrees in philosophy and computer science and engineering. My main focus was on what is sometimes called cognitive science, which for me included studies in philosophy of psychology (or philosophy of mind), psycholinguistics, and artificial intelligence. I had no complaints about MIT in those particular areas of study; I don't know of a better place to have studied those subjects at the time.

My college selection process was constrained, for better or for worse, by the availability of ROTC scholarships, since I was responsible for paying my own college tuition without any significant family contribution or university financial aid. That eliminated a large number of academically selective schools that did not, at the time, have ROTC programs on campus. My selection process was probably also constrained less formally by my father's disapproval of what he seemed to regard as high-priced liberal arts schools for rich kids, which undoubtedly would have included places like Williams and most of the Ivies. (I applied to Cornell as a back-up to MIT, since it had a substantial engineering school as well as ROTC programs; otherwise, I didn't seriously consider the Ivy League.)

If my college selection process had been of unlimited breadth, I probably would have looked seriously at Cal Tech, which I've always greatly respected, and perhaps Princeton, which seemed like a neat place to study mathematics. I suppose I thought of myself back then as more of a mathematics student than anything else; I don't recall ever envisioning myself at Harvard or Yale, perhaps because I (like my father) regarded them as liberal arts schools for rich kids. I don't remember ever thinking seriously about Stanford; I probably just didn't know much about it. I'm fairly confident that I never seriously considered Georgetown.

These days, if I were advising someone who might be interested in checking out some less well-known (but by no means obscure) schools, I might suggest a place like Swarthmore, or perhaps Haverford. I'm not an expert on the "Little Ivies," but I like the idea of a school that provides a relatively calm, intimate, and supportive setting for a well-motivated student, far from the madding crowd.