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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]From Malcolm Gladwell - there are a lot of MIT Business majors that started as STEM majors. You judge yourself with those around you - at top tier school you are likely at the bottom.  He gave an example of a Brown Bio major who dropped out but in retrospect she  thought if she went to UMD she'd have a PHD in the field.

if you prep him for the competition then he might better deal with it.  [/quote]

Love that Gladwell talk, and he is right--for some students. For other students, having average or even below average stats will push the student to work their hardest and accomplish things they would not if they were a top student elsewhere. As a top student among mediocre by comparison peers,  they would coast and not be pushed at the school with the majority of peers not as intelligent/driven as they are. The key is to know your student. There are students who come in with scores and grades indicating they should be top 10% easily and they crash and burn due to one of two things, lack of motivation or the presumption that they are at the top causes them to not take the coursework seriously, not put in the hours, get below the mean on a midterm due to lack of preparation not smarts. That sets off a defeatest attitude where they blame all things around them as the cause, rather than go to office hours, get a tutor if needed figure out what happened, and cut the social schedule. There are students who seem quite similar to the first, based on SAT /AP scores yet pick a reachier school where that places them around average: they know they are going to have to work their a$$ off they talk to other students in advance, talk to advisors, go to all office hours, find study groups, block out the temptation to socialize all weekend and find peers who would rather work hard in the library. They get above the median on the test which inspires them to continue their hard work. They end up in med/law school while their similar stats high school buddy who went to the much easier undergrad and crashed and burned does not. [/quote]

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