[lisper]

Most people are recommending you go so I'd like to offer a different perspective. I was in almost exactly the situation you are in 40 years ago. Got into MIT, Stanford and Caltech. I ended up going to Virginia Tech on a full scholarship. My plan was to do my undergrad there and then go to a more prestigious grad school, but I was rejected from MIT and Stanford for grad school so I ended up staying at Virginia Tech and doing a masters and Ph.D. there. I do not regret any of it, though I do sometimes wonder what might have been if I'd gone to Stanford because I love the Bay Area (I now live 20 minutes from Stanford). I have never for a moment regretted not going to MIT. (I did spend three months there in the summer of 1990 as a "visiting grad student" so I got a little taste of what that life would have been like.)

The real question you need to ask yourself is: what do you really want out of life? You say you want to get a Ph.D. and do a startup. But why do you want to do these things? Is it because you really want to do these things, or is it because you see this as a path to financial independence? If it's the former, then by all means, go to MIT. But if it's the latter, if what you really want is the freedom that (you think) money can buy, then you should think twice. For myself, my personal goal was to live a life where I was not beholden to anyone, and I accomplished that by going to a less rigorous school, staying out of debt, and having more than my share of good luck. So that worked for me. YMMV.

One thing I've learned: the hardest part of getting what you want is figuring out what it is. Figure that our first. Don't spend four or six or ten of your best years chasing someone else's dream.

[Maursault]

> I ended up going to Virginia Tech on a full scholarship.

I think compared to Boston, Pasadena or Stanford, Blacksburg is far more conducive to mental and physical health. And even without your scholarship, VA Tech is cheap, and absurdly cheap compared to you backup schools. Well done. Go Hokies.

FWIW my first choice was CMU, got in early acceptance, but my father's income prevented financial aide. It has increased since, but at the time CMU was $22K/semester while VA Tech in state tuition was $2500/semester. Rents are also much more affordable in SW Virginia than they are in Pgh (or Boston, Pasadena or Stanford). I looked at MIT, but I could not identify the campus; it was just city buildings. To me, Harvard reminded me of a penitentiary.

[lisper]

> I think compared to Boston, Pasadena or Stanford, Blacksburg is far more conducive to mental and physical health.

And I agree. Blacksburg was certainly better for my mental health than Boston. But again, this all turns on what you want out of life. Mental and physical health are not the only things a person could possibly desire. If what you really want is to be on the bleeding edge of something like science and technology, and you're willing to endure some stress and physical discomfort in order to achieve that, then Boston is probably a better place to be. This is why figuring out what you really want is really important and really hard.

Case in point for me: what I really want out of life is freedom: not being beholden to anyone, being able to do whatever I want whenever I want to. I've more or less achieved that, but it comes at a cost: I have no children because if you have children then you are beholden to them (or at least you should be). I have absolutely no regrets about this, but obviously many people want children more than they want freedom, and that's probably a good thing or we'd go extinct. Different strokes for different folks. That plus a free market is what makes technological civilization work.

[Maursault]

> If what you really want is to be on the bleeding edge of something

Sure, but I don't think undergraduates are really bleeding edge participants, more like a necessary evil for bleeding edge participants.

[lisper]

If your goal is to be on the bleeding edge, the best way to get there is to forge relationships with people who are already there. There are many more opportunities to do that at MIT or Stanford than Virginia Tech. The actual education you get is very much a secondary consideration.

[Maursault]

I just disagree fundamentally with what you are floating. Undergraduate educations (meaning where the degree is awarded) could not matter less if continuing to graduate level education, and yet what is learned during undergraduate studies is pretty important. If you don't learn Calculus, and get decent grades doing so, you're not going to be able to get a Masters in Math or CS because you won't get accepted into the program. Though I know of seniors planning on graduate education becoming more active in a department, maybe getting an internship to make photo copies and coffee, I've never really heard of undergraduates "forging relationships" with faculty, at least not beyond a particular semester course. Take two students, all things being equal, but one goes to MIT and learns a lot and ingratiates themselves to faculty, but gets B grades, while the other goes to NC State, ignores faculty, parties for 4 years, but gets straight A's... guess which will be accepted into an MIT graduate program? Grad schools are not political. Graduate acceptance is based on merit, not popularity. Unfortunately, academic merit is based on grades, which are evil, and not based on whether you graduated from Yale or Mountain Springs Community College.

[lisper]

> If you don't learn Calculus, and get decent grades doing so, you're not going to be able to get a Masters in Math or CS because you won't get accepted into the program.

> Grad schools are not political. Graduate acceptance is based on merit, not popularity.

I'm sorry, but this is hopelessly naive.

I entered Virginia Tech with enough AP credit to enter as a sophomore, and within one quarter I was a Junior. I finished my B.S.E.E. in 8 quarters with a 3.9+ GPA (I don't remember exactly what it was, but my diploma says Summa Cum Laude.) It took three calendar years because I did two six-month co-op stints at IBM during that time (this was back in the early 80s when IBM was still a cool place to be.) All that was not enough to get me in to MIT or Stanford as a grad student despite the fact that both had accepted me as an undergrad.

Then, when I was a masters student (at Virginia Tech) I served as the student representative on the admissions committee. I went on to a 13-year-long research career at JPL in what was essentially an academic position without teaching responsibilities. I made my living publishing papers, and by the numbers I was very good at it. At one point I was the most referenced CS researcher in all of NASA, and I held that title for many years after I stopped publishing. I've seen first-hand how the sausage is made. So I can tell you from first hand experience it is intensely political. That is one of the reasons that I quit. I realized that I was getting a lot more leverage out of playing politics than I was out of actually doing good technical work. I got very, very good at gaming the system, and I hated it, so I quit.

I got very, very good grades in all my math classes. In my entire career I have never once had to do an integral or solve a differential equation. By way of very stark contrast, I use my social skills every single day. Those were a lot harder to develop because there wasn't a class I could take. But they have proven vastly more useful in day to day life than math.

The biggest mistake I have ever made in my life is taking much too long to realize that the aphorism that "who you know is more important than what you know" is actually true.

[Throwawayaerlei]

> I've never really heard of undergraduates "forging relationships" with faculty, at least not beyond a particular semester course.

Which means you never did any research for a professor, or know anyone who did. At MIT there's no less than official two programs for that, the main one with very substantial financial incentives.

There's an old saying about MIT that's relevant, "Undergraduates are treated like graduate students, graduate students like junior faculty, and tenured professors like gods." It exaggerates some but it most certainly gets the first bit right, undergraduates are assumed to be capable of graduate level research. "seniors planning on graduate education becoming more active in a department, maybe getting an internship to make photo copies and coffee" is just not how it works at MIT, that's work for MIT's generally very capable office staff.

And thus if you use the research method in "'forging relationships' with faculty" perhaps after acing a course they taught, and you do well, you'll get the inherently political but not in a really bad way "in" to graduate programs when your professor tells a professor who knows your professor that you can do research, as discussed elsewhere.

[jjav]

> Graduate acceptance is based on merit, not popularity.

For common people, yes. I know first-hand people who are very politically connected who went into and graduated from MIT, who are dumb as a rock. With enough money and connections, nothing else matters.