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Who are you trying to convince? If the money was available, I would have continued being a student at the number-one engineering school in the world. I'm not arguing about the way things SHOULD be; I'm describing the way things ARE.

Mikey wrote:Who are you trying to convince? If the money was available, I would have continued being a student at the number-one engineering school in the world. I'm not arguing about the way things SHOULD be; I'm describing the way things ARE.

Oh I know; I just think that too much laziness and misappropriation of our resources (As Americans) passes because of that attitude. That shrug, "oh well, that's reality" thing when it's really just the reality we tolerate. It's not the way it has to be, or the way it is everywhere. We are literally raining money out of our treasury-- if we were going to spend that much deficit spending, let's spend it on something which is going to turn around and more than pay us back on the investment, like education. Not something that floods money out or into a few elite conglomerates, and comes back to bite us in the form of political corruption and the buying off of politicians, but otherwise never returns to us really.

Maybe I'm just a bit bitter about the reality. My test scores put me in the top two percent of the country; I could've gone anywhere, but for the cost. I eventually grew too disenfranchised to continue at all.

Sort of my boat, too, Tsukiyumi. I started at what was literally the top engineering school in the world - although MIT, etc., were close. Ran low, settled for a year at Rutgers (although "settling" is a poor word - RU was the only public university ever invited to join the Ivy League.)

Rutgers is awesome. Good on you for even getting accepted. I was going for MIT or Cal-Tech because both were doing work with fusion reactors.

I don't know if it counts as the same type of acheivement, but when I was at Tech we chem-E majors making 150-proof in their rooms.

Mikey wrote:I don't know if it counts as the same type of acheivement, but when I was at Tech we chem-E majors making 150-proof in their rooms.

That's a form of fusion, right?

Either way, it can be a fuel source! "A shot for my car, a shot for me. A shot for my car, a shot for me."

You and your car can drive drunk.

Yeah, but what better way can you bond with your car other than using the back seat for "recreational purposes"?

I blew the top off the SATs in one sitting (760 math, 750 verbal, each out of 800 for those unfamiliar), each score in the top two percent and the combined score in the top percentage. After breezing through high school with top grades I was accepted into every engineering school I applied for, and was offered spots in honors programs and scholarship money.

Of course, a lot's happened since then (Schizophrenia!) and I've settled for a somewhat less prestigious university; it makes things easier to stay at home right now and the local City University of New York campus is within walking distance. It's not a terribly bad program, at any rate: it was ranked in the top 50 in the USA in public engineering science programs before they stopped listing that ranking. There's been well enough success by graduates.

CUNY is certainly nothing to sneeze at.

The College of Staten Island does enjoy a nice reputation among CUNY schools, too.

Captain Picard's Hair wrote: It's not a terribly bad program, at any rate: it was ranked in the top 50 in the USA in public engineering science programs before they stopped listing that ranking. There's been well enough success by graduates.

In fact, it was #5, IIRC

Tsukiyumi wrote:Maybe I'm just a bit bitter about the reality. My test scores put me in the top two percent of the country; I could've gone anywhere, but for the cost. I eventually grew too disenfranchised to continue at all.

My situation is somewhat similar; I tested very high and had a weighted above-4.0 GPA. However due to cost I went to UC Berkeley (the top public university at the time, not sure where it ranks today) since I am a California resident and I just had to cover living expenses; school itself was only 2,000 a semester with my scholarship. (The scholarship was mostly token since my parents make too much to qualify as poor, but not nearly enough to send me to a place that charges $35,000 a year just for the tuition.) I was lucky even going when I did, though, because thanks to Arnold raiding the public education funds and not paying them back, and later cutting education funding in the budget, the cost is up something like 200% from when I went just six years ago.

I have met a lot of people who attended "better" (more exclusive/expensive?) schools such as USC, Stanford, Georgetown, etc. And to be honest I never got the impression at all that going to such a school indicated any special or above-average intelligence. The only thing all of them seem to have in common is coming from places like Beverly Hills, Orange County or Marin and having money to burn, and/or having higher up connections.