I Think I've Made a Huge Mistake

[thegraydude]

If this is not a troll post, you have some serious evaluation to do regarding your attitude towards life.

 

In the words of Rocky Balboa: "If you know what you're worth, then go out and get what you're worth and don't point fingers saying you ain't where you wanna be because of him or her or nobody. Cowards do that and that ain't you. You're better than that".

 

Allow me to draw from my personal experience in life: I did my BS and MS from ordinary schools in India that no one ever heard of. I did good work and I was recently accepted into the top computer science doctoral program in the US. What I'm trying to say is, nobody cares about where you're from, it's what you are and what you have done with the opportunity that counts.

[spellbanisher]

 Lets be honest, most people in the US have no idea what Caltech, Reed, Bowdoin, Amherst, Williams, Rice, Scripps, Janelia, Mayo Clinic etc are. It doesn't mean they aren't great institutions. Who cares! A prestigious school doesn't necessarily have the best program.  You also are saving 80K in debt. That's a lot of $$$ you're going to save by not having student loans.

Having been a mediocre high student from California, there is lots of name brand schools which I knew nothing about(including all the ones you listed) until maybe a few years ago when I started thinking about grad school. I had I think an idiosyncratic path to learning about many of the big time schools in the United States. 

 

-It wasn't until about two years ago that I learned that Penn St and University of Penn were two different schools, after reading in an internet forum a recruiter mention that they always had to educate California students about the difference between Penn St and the University of Penn. When I told someone from Pennsylvania this a few weeks ago, she looked at me like I had just drowned a puppy.

 

-I first learned about Brown from an episode of Fresh Prince of Belair, when Carlton, who is from a Princeton legacy family, told his father, "what if I don't get into Princeton. What if I have to settle for Harvard, or (shrieks), Brown!" 

 

-I learned about Dartmouth about a year ago when, in an discussion thread about the costs of an Ivy education, someone pointed out that at Dartmouth the expected family contribution for students from families making less than 70k a year was 0. 

 

-I only know about Cornell because one of my favorite shows was The Office (US version), and one of the douchiest characters on that show always brought up the fact that the went to Cornell. 

 

-I learned about Columbia about 4 years ago in my senior year of Undergrad, when I looked up the webpage of one of my favorite professors, who went to Columbia, to which I asked myself, "oh, is that a good school?"

 

-I once thought that Caltech was like some kind of for profit technical college, like ITT Tech. That one is a little embarassing, because I'm from California. 

 

-Until about two years ago I thought that the University of Michigan and University of Wisconsin Madison were just schools for sports fanatics and jocks. UNC Chapel Hill, College of William and Mary, and The Johns Hopkins have only entered into my consciousness in the last few years.  

Edited February 22, 2015 by spellbanisher