zandd.com: Being a Korean-American student, one of the things we constantly hear from our parents is education. They stress the importance of education and nonchalantly remind us that we are the reason why they came to this country in the first place...this land of opportunity. I recall countless times throughout my primary education when my parents said I must go to an Ivy League university. They didn't care if it was Harvard, Brown, Yale, University of Pennsylvania...any Ivy League school. If worst came to worst, it had to be at least a top 25 university as told by the good U.S. News and World Report.

When I became a high school junior, it was finally time to decide which schools I wanted to go to. I asked myself, "Should I be like all the other Korean-Americans and send that application to Harvard for the hell of it?" The answer for me was a simple no. Like the one article that was up by a colleague here in Z & D previously, it simply isn't worth it to go to a school because of its name. The author mentioned how it is wise to go somewhere that you can excel at, rather than to go somewhere where you will end up with a 3.0 if you are lucky. His alternative was a second-tier university. My alternative was a good, small liberal arts school.

If you just want to go through 4 years of undergraduate and work, then it would make sense to go to a brand name school. As long as you don't fail or anything, you're pretty much guaranteed a decent job because of the name of your Ivy school. However, how many Korean-American students these days want to go through just undergraduate? It seems like almost everybody, not only Korean-Americans, are interested in grad schools now. Even though your sophomore and upperclassmen friends at Ivy schools may now not be on the grad school track, I am sure that many of them went in as a pre-med or pre-law. Because the brand name universities are so big, popular, and full of very smart and competitive fellow pre-meds and pre-laws, if you can't keep up with the top of your class, you're eventually going to crash and burn. I know so many cases where the student starts his/her years at the Ivy League school as a pre-med. Most of the time, if they're not out by freshmen year, Organic Chemistry usually does the trick. They "weed" out everything but the top.

I have only mentioned a scenario where a student isn't pre-med or pre-law anymore because he/she couldn't keep up with his/her class at an Ivy League school. The other article mentioned how he knew a number of people who had to transfer because their grades were just that bad. I am not telling anyone to not go to Ivy League schools, but simply reminding you that the top pre-meds, pre-laws, pre-businesses at Ivies are some of the smartest people you will see and have to compete with. A few of my high school friends went in as pre-meds to Princeton and I have to admit, they were geniuses compared to me. I was nothing. Call me a sissy for being scared to compete with them, but my acceptance into a good grad school was much more important to me than my pride, or my parents showing off to other parents, "My son got into this Ivy and that Ivy."

If you think you can compete with the smartest in the nation and graduate in the top of your class as a pre-med, pre-law, or pre-anything at the top universities, go right ahead. If not, why not step down a notch? I know Korean-Americans are supposed to be really smart (we men are supposed to be math geniuses and the women are supposed to be well rounded in their academics), but unless you can successfully and competitively compete with the smartest in the nation, you're really not that smart. For me, I would rather go to an okay school for undergraduate and a good grad school than go to a great undergrad and then go to a bad grad school, or no grad school at all. I was reading one of the letters to the editor and one student wrote how she agreed with the one article. She went to a state school for her undergraduate studies, graduated top of her class there, and now she's at Columbia Medical School.

You might say to yourself now, "Why don't I go to a community college or a state school, do really well there, and then go to Harvard Med?" Well let me ask you this: "How many people do you know who have done that?" Not that many. The reason lies in the difficulty of academically doing well at a party school. Even though it is not impossible (the girl who went to Columbia Med), it is extremely easy to get sucked into the no-study mode at a big school with such a large Korean-American population.

I guess I still haven't answered why liberal arts schools are good for pre-meds, pre-laws, pre-anything. Before I go on though, if you are not pre-something, get into the best university you can with lots of Korean-Americans. Since this will be the final years of your formal education, have some fun. Why a large university though? Trying to have fun in a liberal arts school as a Korean-American is pretty hard. Please, we're called liberal arts.

Even though I did not know in high school what I exactly wanted to go to grad school for, I did my research. Besides the fact that being pre-something at a liberal arts school isn't as competitive as being pre-something at Harvard, liberal arts schools also generally have a much higher grad school acceptance rate than that of the Ivies'. For example, I found out during the tour that the school I am at right now had a 98% acceptance rate into business schools, 96% for law schools, and 91% for medical schools. These acceptance rates were much higher than the 70-something percent acceptance rates I found for the University of Pennsylvania. Other Ivies' grad school acceptance rates were similar or lower.

It really stinks though, right? How all Asians are all pre-something these days? If we all didn't have to worry about getting into grad school, we could have just studied really hard in high school, get into the best college we could, and then have fun while maintaining a decent GPA. Imagine, we'd be enjoying the best time of our lives, going to all the parties we could, exploring the city every weekend, etc. But everywhere you go these days, all that you hear about are these ambitious Asians wanting to be the rich doctor or lawyer. Good thing I'm only pre-business...a little less competition to worry about.

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