Now, I’m trying to figure out what to do with myself for next year. I know that I want an atmosphere of smart, driven, people (for both rub-off effect and cofounder potential) and professors I can both learn from and do good work with. The problem is that there’s no place I’ve been accepted to that offers all that and an affordable price. My options seem to be as follows:
-Get into Yale off the waitlist: Seems like the ideal outcome, considering their financial aid and overall atmosphere; the main drawback seems to be the lack of engineering focus, although I get the impression there’ll be plenty of technical things there to keep me occupied and more.
-Cornell (Engineering): Everything’s good, except that my family can’t afford to pay for Cornell with the aid package they’ve sent us. Some negotiation may help, but most likely, the only real option will be to try to secure a guaranteed transfer after a year at Tufts and graduate in two years with AP and Tufts credits.
-Tufts: Tufts is tuition-free for me thanks to my mother working there, but the atmosphere there strikes me as a bit indolent and even less technically focused than Yale, although the students seem talented enough. On the positive side, Tufts is close to Boston, and I could work on research somewhere in Cambridge if I didn't find what I needed at Tufts. A downside would be continuing to be the “too-intense guy” I come off as at my high school, and potentially continuing to feel slowed down by my peers.
-McGill: This strikes me as a not particularly good option, unless someone has something positive to say. It’s more than affordable, though.
-UMass Amherst: Possible full ride scholarship. That summarizes the pluses, as far as I can tell.
So I guess the more general question amounts to: Is it worth paying large sums of money for me as a budding entrepreneur to be around smart, like-minded students for my college years?
(Sorry for the novel, but I feel that the HN community is the best place to get solid advice from those who have been through my current situation, and I needed to get the situation across)
Thanks for the help.
I'm guessing that you seem too one-dimensional. Admissions committees look for someone that'll add diversity to the campus - not just racial diversity, but diversity of interests too.
I went to Amherst (College, not UMass). Something like 1 in 8 of my admitted class had a 4.0 and 1 in 10 had perfect SATs, but we all had something else besides that. Like my astro-major dormmate who was also a nationally-ranked scrabble player. Or my friend who'd been left for dead at age 10 in Liberia, and had started his own organization dedicated to eradicating child soldiers. I'd worked in an all-teenage dot-com in my gap year before college, too.
Anyway, here's my somewhat heretical advice:
Don't go to college - yet. Instead, if you're really set on tech entrepreneurship, take a year off and found a startup. Take it as far as you can - pick out a market, talk to people in that market, try to design and build a product that satisfies that market.
If you succeed, great - you don't need college. You can always pull a Woz and go back anyway. But even if you fail, it'll teach you lots about what you really want to do. It may not be what you think now. One of my biggest regrets is that I basically planned my college career based on what I thought I wanted to do in my last year of high school, completely ignoring the lessons from my gap year. I could've saved myself a lot of aggravation and made my college experience a lot more meaningful had I adjusted my plans for where I wanted to go and what I wanted to study based on my experience working in a tech startup.
And if you fail - great. You'll look so much better to colleges for having given it a shot. Maybe you'll even get into Stanford or MIT next time around.
As for the gap year - wow, that could be a really good idea. I had considered that option, but I guess I didn't think about it enough. The lack of co-founders and money could pose problems in certain areas, but I could either just keep pushing the web app I've been developing to commercial release, or go to work at someone else's startup. Do those sound like potentially good ideas? (I can probably even defer enrollment to a college to have a safety net in case rejections round two comes around)
Also, what did you learn during your gap year, more specifically? (if it's not entirely specific to your case)
Thanks for the insight; I have a lot more thinking to do, but taking a gap year could be a very good option for me.
Edit: Posted before I saw your comment, fuzzmeister; that's probably a good way to have my cake and eat it too, although the downside is that I won't exactly be motivated to succeed with the startup no matter what if I have a spot at a college waiting for me.
As for whether to join someone else's startup or start your own - I'd say do whichever will answer more questions about your future life (in answering them, it'll raise more). If you feel you absolutely must start a company to be fulfilled, go do it. That's how I felt, though I waited until I was out of college and had a couple years of work experience under my belt. I started it, it failed miserably, and it was still one of the best decisions I made in my life.
In my case, I worked for someone else's startup in my gap year, just because the opportunity presented itself. My math teacher was starting a company; his company had a wholly owned subsidiary that was doing a teen-content .com; it was being staffed exclusively by teenagers (many of whom were my friends from high school); did I want to join? Of course I did. You will probably learn more technical skills working for someone else than you will on your own; there's a vast body of knowledge in everyday software engineering that's largely passed from engineer-to-engineer, and you miss out on a lot of it if you only learn from the Internet. OTOH, you will probably learn more about yourself and what you want if you start your own company.
It's hard for me to say precisely what I learned in my gap year, because most knowledge takes the form of skills, not facts, and you can't reduce skills to words. I do think it was one of the most educational experiences, perhaps the most educational, that I'd had up to that point in my life. A quick list, based on what I remember 8 years later:
I learned Perl scripting (actually, I sorta knew it before, but I learned it better.) I learned how there's always a core group of people that actually get things done while the rest of the office takes long lunches and bitches about how the core group is usurping their authority. I learned how to exaggerate your PR budget so companies pay attention to you. I learned how to feed newspapers a hook so that they do a story on you ("all teenage dot-com" actually got us a lot of free publicity), and I learned that all this PR doesn't matter if your product sucks. I learned that what you think of as "intelligent" content usually just seems pretentious to other people. I learned that even if you start with users, they'll leave if you take away the reason they came - and that reason is not always obvious to you as the designer of the site. I learned that teenagers can be just as vicious at office politics as adults. Actually, this last one is a really broad lesson. Next time you think "That guy is evil; I could do his job so much better", think about what you would actually do if you were placed in his job and had to operate under his constraints. Chances are, you'd be just as incompetent and evil as he is.
Anyway, I'm only 3 months into my gap year...
I learned about version control and IDEs. I learned Java Swing. I learned about maintaining other people's code, and that it's basically a waste of time to fix their formatting (other than mixed tabs/spaces, which should always be converted to spaces. ;-)) I learned about OOP and how to split up responsibilities between classes. Unfortunately I didn't learn about avoiding cyclic dependencies, but at least I was primed so I could understand why this was a problem when I learned it in college. I learned that your first attempt at a program usually turns out badly, even if you have 30 years of experience under your belt, and so you should always be revising and refactoring your code. I learned that companies will often shift their business plan entirely when they are a week away from beta. I learned that this is not always a good idea.
I learned that cool projects often go to the guy who happens to be in the office at the time someone dreams them up (sorry, Trevor). I learned how to design UIs myself and get them working. I learned that you should always, always try to code things up incrementally, working in small chunks, though I had to relearn this about 5 times more before it really sank in. I "learned" C++ and why manual memory management sucks. While I should've been debugging those segfaults, I learned that thousands of fangirls will go wild for Draco Malfoy in leather pants (this turned out to be very important for my career later).
I learned InstallShield, and why just about every desktop software package leaves behind a ton of junk when you uninstall it. I learned that manually testing installation executables on a half dozen VirtualPC boxes kinda sucks. I tried to learn WinRunner but it never sunk in. I did learn design patterns while I was avoiding WinRunner though.
I learned that companies that stay "2 weeks away from beta" for more than 2 months have a tendency to stay that way indefinitely. (Though not always: I've heard that offline GMail was "2 weeks away from launch" for a year, and they did eventually get it out.) I learned that code quality matters a lot, and that if you write sucky code in the name of just getting it done, you will pay for it later, possibly forever. I learned that you need to know what you're building in order to build it, but I took the wrong lesson from that: I learned that you should always have specs that try to think of every eventuality, when I should've learned that you should always have prototypes and working code that tries to explore every eventuality. I learned that companies should always keep track of their cash very carefully, and they should know when a $6M bridge loan is coming due, and that VCs behave basically like sharks when they smell blood in the water. I learned that certain company founders will also do pretty crazy things with the remnants of their company, like run off to China with its IP when the VC sues them.
All in all, I'd say it was highly educational. :-)
2) It's possible that despite your grades, MIT and other schools decided your passion for starting up would be too much in conflict with what other students typically look for in MIT, and that either the course load would make you unhappy, or your startup ambitions could affect your progress (I'm just guessing here.)
You were honest with the colleges, and they were honest with you back. This isn't necessarily a bad thing: would it have been better if you lied that you wanted to be a professor, and gotten in because of that? Instead of worrying about being rejected from a fancy college, realize that your essay probably had the most impact, and the admissions officers are helping you make your decision. If you try to do a startup for a year, fail, and change your mind, you could always reapply and they will likely take you this time around.
3) If one wanted to finish school as fast as possible and without debt, they could do the following.
UMass Amherst requires 45 credits in residence to earn a degree (outside of Engineering). I can imagine one could take all non-General Education classes over their first three semesters; somebody from my high school completed the non-General Education requirements by the end of Sophomore year.
I can imagine you could then reside anywhere you like, completing your General Education Requirements with classes over the Internet, and occasionally some classes at whatever school is nearby and transferring them over.
Sure, if you moved somewhere else and completed the non-CS requirements online, you would miss out on some student interaction, but you would be 19, so it wouldn't be too bad.
If you don't accelerate your pace, UMass Amherst may feel like a "gap year" anyway, and you would be able to do whatever other side projects you had in mind while maintaining good grades. UMass Amherst is also a top 20 CS grad school, and you could take grad school classes if you wished.
The part I didn't like is that they really, really stay away from engineering stuff. Like, there's no course on RDBMses (even a theoretical one) because the subject is too "practical". It served me well for getting into Google, it did not serve me well in the startup world.
At least, that was the general impression of grad schools at UMaryland undergrad, and UWashington alumni are noticeable at both Microsoft and Google (UCLA and UCSD, not so much).
From my brief contact there, the culture is like a toned-down version of UCBerkeley. Whether that's a good thing is up to you.
The weather is as bad as you've heard -- worse because the three monthes of sunshine a year are the three monthes you won't be there.
FWIW, RIT is the exact same way. Not that I go there, even though I was accepted. I go to the state school down the road — cost of 4 years here is a year and a half at RIT. And it's undergrad. It amounts to the same things being taught in similar manners regardless of where you (or I) happen to be.
I am currently having to choose between Georgia Tech (nearly free) and Emory (50k/year). I'm not a math/engineering person, while that background would be nice I see myself as an Econ major. I hate to hijack the topic, but I'm in a tough situation as well...
Would YC prefer a non engineering grad from Emory or GT?
Second, more people know GT than Emory anyway. I only know Emory because a neighbor went there.
Third, if you get a graduate degree, it will completely over run your undergrad degree anyway. My dad went to a shitty (so shitty it no longer exists) state school in west virginia, and got C's. He then went to work for 10 years, then got an MBA from a good business school. Now he is the CEO of a 160 million a year company. Does anyway care about his undergrad degree? Hell no. Do they care about the MBA? Definitely more than the undergrad, you can't sit at most of the interviews if you don't have an MBA. But the only thing they REALLY care about is his performance ON THE JOB.
Remember, your undergrad degree only gets you the first interview. It might seem huge from high school, but you will eventually realize that teachers only hype it to motivate you in high school. it doesn't matter that much in the business world.
Stop conforming. Immediately.
As a Yale student, let me give you some advice should you get the opportunity to come here. First off, it's truly an amazing place. Kids here are brilliant and Yale will give you money to do absolutely anything you're interested in. All you have to do is ask. There's also the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, an incubator for student ventures. Think of it as a Y Combinator for Yale students; you get a 5K stipend to spend the summer in New Haven, work on your project and attend workshops.
With that said, there are a few things you should be aware of. Yale is obviously not known for its science or engineering focus but among many students there's actually a contempt for any subject involving numbers. Most of my friends fulfilled their math requirement with ridiculous classes like "The Pleasures of Counting" or "Geometry of Nature." I am not even joking.
As a science student I sometimes feel like a second class citizen. Science/Engineering classes tend to meet earlier than usual and on Fridays. The buildings are all on Science Hill which is a 10-15 minute walk from central campus. This isn't a huge deal until December when New Haven turns into an icy hellscape for three months.
Finally, as far as entrepreneurship goes, you'll find a lot of kids here who would be interested in co-founding a venture. The only problem is most of them don't have the technical background to put their money where their mouth is.
I'd be glad to talk to you more about this or answer specific questions. My e-mail address is HN User Name at gmail.
A simple, but in retrospect insightful bit of advice that I ignored (but shouldn't have) when choosing a university is the following: go through the course catalogue and figure out what percentage of all the classes you would certainly find interesting, all other considerations being equal, choose the school with the best percentage!
Thanks for the advice on the course catalog - I'll definitely do that.
Anything close to Boston would be pretty cool. I hear there's a pretty strong hacker scene there... but I've never been there myself.
There is nothing better for your career as an entrepreneur than to spend four years in Boston, among students, and then emerge debt-free. Save that money you would spend going to Cornell so that you can spend it on your startup later.
The dirty little secret of undergraduate education is: It's much the same wherever you go. You are taught by grad students and by professors who have not got enough seniority to get out of teaching undergraduates. The textbooks are the same everywhere. The engineering schools with better reputations usually get those reputations by having lots of great, well-funded researchers... none of whom have anything to do with undergraduate teaching if they can help it. And if you're smart, curious, have a good library and two or three mentors you're going to learn as much as you want, no matter the surroundings.
Sometimes the smaller schools with poorer research reputations actually have better undergraduate teaching.
Until you get to much lower-ranked schools than any on your list, the major difference from school to school is your fellow students. But Tufts is in Boston. If the Tufts scene just isn't for you, ride the train to MIT. I've been impersonating an MIT alum off and on for years, and I'm sure impersonating a student is even easier if you're the right age. Just go to their club meetings, study in their libraries, hang out at Mary Chung's. Get summer jobs in their labs or their startups. You can probably even take their classes if you want.
Now, here's a hypothesis for you [1]: I'm guessing that your otherwise inexplicable rejection from all those top schools is because they took one look at your application, said "hey, this one will be getting an admission and a free ride from Tufts," and decided to expend their precious slots elsewhere.
[EDITORIAL UPDATE: I've removed my interesting sidelight about the old Ivy League admissions collusion scandal, partly because it wasn't important to my wacky hypothesis, but mostly because I misremembered it. See below for correction and link.]
I'm sorry if that rankles. Nobody likes to feel like they're being railroaded. But you are being railroaded into freaking Tufts. Count your blessings! Ride the legacy-student rails! Pick another time of life to be crazy and rebellious! And if you get too depressed, go talk to someone who just got out of school and is $50k in debt.
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[1] Obviously, this hypothesis hinges on your application containing information about who your mother is and where she works. I'm assuming it does -- financial aid applications have that and more, right? Although for all I know the colleges have a strict separation of financial-aid apps and admissions apps, and they also don't cheat. In which case, on to the next hypothesis! ;)
I'm pretty sure this is mistaken information. The quoted statement is about admission rather than financial aid. The colleges used to confer about financial aid offers. Then, yes, they were told based on antitrust law that they couldn't do that anymore.
Now, with permission from Congress, they STILL confer to discuss general principles of how they administer financial aid, but I'm sure that the admission decisions are not made in collusion, and I'm even more sure that the college lawyers now don't let the financial aid offices talk about specific applicants before financial aid offers are made.
If that doesn't work you should go to the best place that costs you the least amount of money.
I'll probably offend the alumni of the schools I mention, but as someone who has assisted with hiring for startups, I don't believe HR really distinguishes between places like McGill, Amherst or Tufts (or even places like Cornell and Brown.) However, Harvard, MIT or Stanford will definitely get you an interview.
I didn't get into anywhere good and instead went to a no-name private school in the midwest that essentially paid me to go there. Since then I've worked alongside, and been paid the same as people from MIT, Stanford, Harvard and Berkeley, as well as people who dropped out of high school.
I would have preferred paying for Stanford if that had been an option. However, I'm very glad I'm not 200K in debt to a "2nd choice" school.
In your situation I'd probably go to Tufts if Yale doesn't come through. Living in that area definitely beats Amherst.
Really? Would it be worse to go to Harvard than, say, to the University of Nevada Reno?
The environment of your college matters. Your peers matter. In college, a bad crowd will not just slow you down, they'll take you down.
More importantly, you actually have no idea which one of these schools is a best fit for you. My focus was Columbia in highschool. You know what I realized now? It would have been a horrible fit for me. UIUC is pretty good culture wise (mostly because of the CS department) and it has far better Computer Science. I didn't even apply to the school which I realize now would be the best fit (Berkeley). But I had never even heard of Berkeley outside of the CS rankings because it's not an Ivy.
Recognizing that you have very little chance in correctly reading your own needs, try narrowing down the college by obvious criteria:
1.) Place yourself in a top 10 department in the subject you want to study.
2.) Make sure the campus culture is at least a decent fit for you (i.e., don't go to a big 10 school if you have an aversion to sports and partying. I personally think the hardcore party people here are jokes, but I have no problem dealing or even being friends with them.).
3.) Minimize the amount of money it takes you to get there. Only make a concession if your upgrading yourself from a bottom half of the top 10 to a number 1.
4.) Make sure the campus is a place where you see yourself living for four years.
Academics + Culture + Minimal Money + Location. It really is that simple. I doubt more than one of the colleges on your list fits into the above criteria.
EDIT: Also, don't beat yourself up over not getting in. It's essentially a coin flip when it comes down to it. I thought I had a pretty kickass profile too, but there you go. As PG has written, it's not in the best interest of the admissions committee to spend the time picking the exact best candidates. And believe me, this type of rejection will keep happening. I just got rejected from a NASA scholarship I thought I had a pretty good shot at. In the rejection email, they suggested if I reapplied to improve on pretty much every aspect of my application! I know my app was better than that. Like I said.. meh. :)
How did you describe your plans for the future in your application?
placed in top ~50 of my grade nationwide in math competitions
I follow a lot of math competitions, as a math coach. Which competitions were the ones you participated in most avidly?
the "too-intense guy" I come off as at my high school
What specific behaviors are your high school classmates observing as they come to that conclusion about you?
I follow a lot of math competitions, as a math coach. Which competitions were the ones you participated in most avidly? I narrowly missed the MA Mathcounts team in middle school, and have done well on other less prestigious competitions (HMMT, NEML, CML...), but my AMC/AIME results are probably the best. Unfortunately, my highest AIME score, an 11 (and presumably USAMO qualification), was just this year and therefore probably didn't factor in to decisions much.
What specific behaviors are your high school classmates observing as they come to that conclusion about you?
I focus on my work at the expense of an active social life, and I make an effort to really understand all knowledge that comes my way, rather than just working for grades (if that) and acting anti-intellectual (the prevailing culture). I did lack social skills in middle school, so the reputation carryover could be creating an additional gulf between my classmates and me.
Since actually going there, my feelings about college have changed a lot. It seems to me that I have a whole lifetime ahead of me to work like a dog, if I want to. I would have rather spent my college years exploring things I didn't know much about - like art, travel, people, languages - instead of obsessing over math and science, which I was already pretty good at.
My advice is this: If you want to do technological entrepreneurship, then that path will be available to you in four years. You're already ahead of the curve, and you don't need to do much during college. Go somewhere interesting, relax and have fun.
If you really want to go to MIT/etc. or something and kill yourself for 4 years, go for it. I don't think it's necessary, unless you HAVE to work at <insert name of prestigious company> as your first job out of college.
Also, don't underestimate the effect of a full-ride or close to it. Being debt free or nearly so while making 60k+ a year in your early 20s is nothing to scoff at.
If I were in your shoes, knowing what I know now, at 25, and given the options listed, I would take the full ride in a heartbeat.
My friend runs a great site for high schoolers going through the college admissions process. I'd suggest checking it out: zinch.com
Congrats on your acceptances, McGill is a great school, too
Best way to get a reality check: make a list of 100 people you admire, find out how many of them went to an Ivy League school. Wikipedia makes it easy as hell. The schools are great but saving that money is much, much better.
Take a good week off to just step back from the college admissions process and recollect your thoughts so you can look at it objectively. I'm sure right now it's a bit stressful and probably overwhelming, not to mention getting spanked by the rejections is a bit of a blow to the ego... especially coming from somebody who sees themselves as slowed down by my peers...
Once you take that break, spend a good couple hours alone and not distracted to just write out (and I mean write, not think) what you really want out of your life for the next couple years. You don't need to have concrete goals, but something as simple as "I'd like to start my own software business before I graduate" or "I want to get involved with mathematics research projects" are examples. You seem like someone who is very driven, so I bet you'll have no problem with this.
Secondly, write down who you are and what are your values. Are you the type of person that needs the structure of class to be motivated, or can you stay focused on your own? How much personal time do you want? Obviously a less demanding class-load gives you more time to work on your own projects.
Once you lay down the big picture of who you are as a person and your overall goals/purpose for the next few years, it's going to be 1000x easier to choose a college. It's like finding the shoe that fits you best.
Finally, you'll find plenty of people who are smarter than you, even at a state school. I knew many people "smarter" than myself when I went to a state school, yet I was the one who was making a 5 figure income by my senior year in college from my own business (as if money is the only thing that matters). For the record, I was only a 1400 SAT.
Cornell Engineering really is good, and I have nothing but good things to say about the CS department here (okay, I can criticize them on using SML/NJ for CS 312/3110, but meh. It's still a functional language). Every one of the students I've worked with has been great. Another thing is that engineering here isn't looked down upon. It's sort of looked at as one of the hard colleges to be in here. If people want a group of students to make fun of here, there's plenty of Hotelies. :)
The CS education you'll get here is great. If you can find the money to come here, it's worth it. I know someone graduating with something like $80,000 in loans, but from the opportunities Cornell has given her, it's worth it.
About the rejections from those good schools, I've heard it's possible to reject some really good students because they're literally too good. If a school thinks that you're likely to apply to a bunch of really good schools and get into some of them, they may reject you so that they don't end up extending an offer and getting turned down.
I was fortunate enough to go to a small engineering school with many people who shared my interests (Case Western Reserve). It was a great experience that I will cherish for a long time to come. My school is not very famous and the name didn't help me out in any job interviews, but I got a "good" job just the same.
In my experience, the biggest benefit of a college is having an extensive alumni network and lots of cool companies recruit there. If you want to work for a startup, then even that doesn't matter. This didn't matter for me because the company I work for doesn't recruit at CWRU. I got an interview after applying online.
One thing to keep in mind is that I think I learned more from my peers than I did from my professors. I think that is the whole idea behind a university.
Honestly, you're never going to be 'slowed down' by your peers the way you probably were in high school. A lot of learning in college goes on outside of the classroom. I /think/ a lot about all my classes, go talk to all my professors outside of class (even the humanities ones!) and probably get a lot more out of my classes than everyone else taking them. People aren't slowing me down, I'm just getting more out of the same material. Additionally, there're independent studies, doing research, having a job--you'll find that there are plenty of ways to occupy your time. : ]
So, with that in mind, I'd consider the overall culture of the school. What do you want to be doing in your spare time? What type of people do you want to be hanging out with? That being said, every school (especially the larger ones) have people of all types.
To answer your first apprehension: being around like-minded people is incredibly important. Graduating from one of the best high schools in the nation, I was around people who were intellectuals so there was always wonderful discussions to whet and kindle my growing mind. Two years later, I'm at the local state university whose stigma is entirely accurate. Few people—even in the honors college—are true intellectuals. Living here has been an intellectual nightmare for me, and I can sense my acuity and mental agility suffering.
However, I really didn't have a choice. My family could not afford to send me anywhere else. Basically, the situation I got stuck with was this: paying $40k+/year for a wonderful, private institution or paying $0/year (including room and board) and getting compensated a stipend for the local state university which still made USNWR's top-tier colleges list.
And really, if you're going for engineering, then you're going to learn the same thing anywhere. I'd argue that illustrious universities really aren't a frugal choice. Graduating debt free is really going to free me up financially to start up my company instead of needing to find a job right out of school to fund myself. Also, the local state university offered a lot of options for testing out of classes, so I'm graduating in three years, as opposed to four.
One more thing to consider: student life. You don't want to be miserable, even if it's cheaper or a better school. I've known to many of my peers who went to their dream school and then hated their life. Consider spending time on campus and getting familiar with the local scene.
Good luck.
Anyway, as an international, I can't get financial aid at most schools (only Harvard, MIT and a few others are need-blind for intls). So, I'm faced with a similar question. Is it worth paying so much for Stanford or CMU?
Tufts has a generally good reputation, though not particularly technical. Free is good and Boston is good. You might investigate if you can take high-level CS courses at MIT or Harvard with a Tufts enrollment (I think it's possible, but you'll want to know details). It's certainly possible to join the MIT culture without actually enrolling there.
Yale receives a certain degree of contempt in technical circles. It's probably possible to get a solid education there, but certainly don't expect the name to open doors.
I also have found that though students are capable of getting good grades, they tend to be less intellectually curious than, for example, the average HN reader.
So don't make your decision simply thinking that good reputation = great students. I think the ancillary benefits of being in Boston easily outweigh any relative drawbacks of going to Tufts.
Back at SSU I knew of another Stanford grad who was humble and was genuinely into software and all around a spiffy guy. And he knew more than my cube-neighbor.
Here's thing thing about "it" schools like Stanford, MIT: it's something of an illusion. Sure they great schools and they do the best research, if that is where you want to go (something I had a hard time doing at SSU). Before I got hired I worked on my own stuff, contributed code and had all-around genuine extracurricular fun messing around with systems, hacking, and reading about binary analysis and security. That's the kind of stuff that gets you somewhere. Not going to "it" schools gives you the freedom to pick what your extracurricular stuff is, though. :)
I guess my advice is to do what ever you want. In life there are front doors that are jammed and there are back windows you can slip in unnoticed if you know where to look.
Engineers tend have a more limited idea of how technical expertise ought to be acquired: at a top 10 (maybe 15) ranked university. So, Stanford, MIT, and Cornell are very fine choices for mechanical or electrical engineering. For you then, Cornell is the only way to go for engineering.
I highly taking a serious look.
So my advice to you is: Screw college. Start your business now.
I didn't apply to any Ivy. I thought about MIT but decided not to apply because my brother went to a *IT and for a lot of reasons hated the whole "only guys on campus in engineering degrees" atmosphere.
I'll give you four reasons why a "lesser" school will wind up making you MUCH happier
1) Focus - those schools are not super focused on engineering. You are second fiddle to the business and humanities - always. That applies for all the Ivy's, tufts, amherst, (not sure about mcgill)
2) Legacy - based on the 10 or so people who went from my high school that I knew prior to my college choice, non were happy with their classmates. A lot of the kids who get into ivy are children of alumni, and thus are not as qualified as you are, so your classes are a lot weaker than you would expect.
3) Money - If you can get into one of those schools you can get a full ride at plenty of BETTER technical schools. I got a full ride+, meaning tuition, books, housing, to 5 of the top 20 schools in my major (mechanical engineering), and I only applied to 5.
4 (and most importantly)) If you really are smart and know your stuff. your undergraduate degree does not matter. One of two things will happen to you after college, you will successfully start your own business and your credentials won't matter, or you will get a graduate degree.
It seems to me that you have the list of the north eastern top 10 schools and applied to them without digging deeper into the list of colleges and finding the true engineering gems. Start with US news & world reports rankings for comp eng/comp sci or whatever you want, they are not perfect but they are a good place to start. Then visit them and decide for yourself. Setup private meetings with professors/deans. The group tours done by students are utterly useless. It doesn't matter what the dorms look like or how well manicured the lawns are. Ask if undergraduates are involved in research, what the study abroad programs are like, what areas the school's research focuses on, etc. Specific questions about the program.
For me I had a list of 5 schools that lined up and narrowed them down by program quality, and then focus. For example I liked Penn State's aerospace engineering program, but their focus was on propulsion at the time and I'm not very interested in that. Where as the school I go to now focuses on fuel cells and robotics, both of which interest me. Those are the questions to be asking, not whether people will recognize the name of your school on a resume.
Also I would say that you MUST go to a school on a school day, observing the interactions between students tells you all you need to know about the place. I went to one school over the summer and loved it, and then during the school year people looked so "click"-y I didn't want to go there anymore.
The problem for you is this - transfer students are generally not offered scholarships. So you are a bit late to the party for applying and getting money. I would say nothing is as important as minimizing your college debt if you want to remain flexible to start a company. It might be worth applying scattershot to a bunch of schools before their deadlines and working it out later, or taking a half year off and do something to boost your resume and apply again. Normally I would say transfer but if you have a resume like that, you will get money else where so don't leave that on the table.
Sorry for the rambling but I'm between projects, good luck, email me if you have more questions. Just look back some day and say, the best thing that ever happened to me was getting rejected from the IVYs.
