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Cost of living is a huge factor in many university towns that no one likes to talk about or even investigate much as though landlords in very expensive places have a preference for poor college students. It also depends on what you want to do in chemistry since especially at the PhD level it greatly depends on WHO you’d be mentored by, assist in research, teach for, so what they’re like as a person and how relevant they are to your own research topics. How well equipped and accessible are the labs? Beware a tiny, lovely lab with far too many students trying to use it, great for campus tours but hell on getting things done, and very, very common.So some thoughts based on those factors:Louisiana State University (Organic Chemistry)University of Southern Mississippi (polymers)University of Akron (polymers)University of Montana at Butte (School of Mines)North Dakota State University at Grand ForksOhio State UniversityIowa State UniversityUniversity of Michigan at Ann ArborUniversity of WyomingNotice they’re all state campuses, generally much cheaper although financial aid at private campuses makes that something to check deeply, in places with a lot less competition for housing, lots of scholarships and industry partnerships, and engineering schools, agriculture programs, biotech, etc. that could end up being very relevant to you. I’m not sure if all of them have a PhD in Chem but all have strong chemistry programs.

This didn’t happen personally to me. It happened to others, but in the end, I helped these others to get justice. My then wife took a position during the 1990’s with a plastics firm in Ohio as a safety engineer. A few months after beginning her position, she came home and was sullen and withdrawn for the entire weekend. I kept asking her, “what’s wrong? Please tell me about it.” She replied, “I can’t. I’ll have to quit my job.” I waited patiently and on Sunday night, she broke down in my arms and told me this story:She told me that when she first started working for this firm that she noticed that they had a blow mold machine that they called, “the octopus”. They would assign tall, young men to operate the octopus because it required both strength and height to operate it completely. Several of these current and former octopus workers confided in my then wife that within months of working with this machine, each and every one of these workers would get 2nd and 3rd degree burns on both forearms, leaving them hurt, in pain, missing work, and with scars for life.My then wife spent a month researching safety devices that would remove the prospect that any worker would ever be burned again. She brought the proposal to her boss. Mr. Boss replied, “How much does this cost?” Former wife replied $250,000. Mr. Boss then asked, “How much did we pay out last year in workers’ comp and sick time for this particular injury?” She returned a month later with that figure for her boss—- $127,000. The boss replied, “No, we aren’t purchasing that safety equipment. The losses are half the cost.” My former wife left his office conflicted, ashamed and feeling that she was a coconspirator in these workers’ harm.A little background on how modern business corporations work in the US—-there is an immediate need to satisfy the shareholders by quarter at best and per annum at worse. We are not living in the 1950’s anymore when business invested in the long term prospects and treated employees as an asset. Employees are strictly a liability now. That explains why Mr. Boss didn’t say, “How long will this safety improvement last once it’s attached to the octopus?” My former wife would have replied, “At least 5 years.” We can all do the math and come to the same conclusion that the safety device would have been CHEAPER than the losses in sick time and workers’ comp, but that is simply not how business has operated since Reagan took office during 1981 when protections were abandoned and the business model was restructured.My former wife found another position with another Fortune 100 company. Two years later, I was finally getting around to finishing my bachelor’s degree. I was walking down the quad at the University of Akron and I saw a late twenties man, very tall, drinking a soda. As he lifted the bottle to his mouth, I saw the familiar burns on his forearm. I asked him if he worked at *Evil Plastic Corporation and he replied, “Yes…why?” We had a long talk. I was an activist for human rights at the time and I gave him a contact at a law firm and my own phone number. He called me several years later and asked me if I remembered him. I did. He told me that they had won a class action lawsuit in the settlement stage against *Evil Plastic Corporation. I was and still am ecstatic.I wish that I could convince single issue voters to look at the bigger picture and not to vote against themselves in the long run. We need OSHA, labor laws, labor unions, environmental protections, the best free education possible, and healthcare for all…in addition to dozens of other protections and capture programs. What is a “capture” program, you ask? It means that when you are at your most vulnerable, there is a program to assist you to get back on your feet and recover your financial losses. We need to stop referring to programs such as workers’ comp as “entitlements”. They aren’t for the begging for freeloaders. You, the worker paid into them with your taxes, blood, sweat, and tears. You deserve this protection. You, the worker, whether you are coding at a computer or building a motor on the floor of a manufacturing plant, are the backbone this country’s economy and financial health.*Name changed to protect the litigants.

An all-too-common mistake is for people applying to elite schools to somehow start imagining that less selective admission schools are worse or beneath them. It’s a psychological disposition known as projection.In more technical terms: Having reduced the wider set of possible schools to an elite sub-group, the person begins to believe he or she is more suited for that sub-group than the wider group. Alternatives (i.e., non-Ivy League schools) become inferior in the person’s mind.Such people fail to realise that even the very best students anywhere have slim chances at getting into elite schools, since so many conditions must align. He or she believes that because Brown, say, is a bit less selective (by the numbers) than Harvard, “Brown is a safety school”. Yet, the logical fallacy is in assuming that the same quality students apply to both schools. In reality, a smaller, but higher quality batch could, in a given year, apply to Brown.As a result, such people don’t include any safeties (i.e., schools more realistic for everyone) and are left with few (school) options when denied admission.However, as another Quoran here has suggested: This isn't the end of the world.In the smaller picture, getting into any elite school—especially an Ivy—is cause for a celebration, a block party and a moratorium on social media—assuming that is the type of education or professional path you want.At the same time, in he bigger picture, an elite education is not everyone’s path. Like anything else, attending an Ivy League school is a means to an end and the smartest person chooses the right means to achieve his or her desired ends, whenever possible.So if you don’t get into an Ivy League or other elite school—as most applicants don’t—it’s not going to mean the end of your life. Just suck it up, move on, and don’t make the false assumption that people who never went the same route are lesser.In fact, I was rejected from all my top choice schools after a math teacher gave me a bad letter, despite my having gotten the highest grade in his class. Nonetheless, it didn't phase me, as I kind of felt things happen the way they do for a reason. So I went to Northwestern, and never regretted it.A couple of years later, after sophomore year and after I started going to Stanford, I visited home and came by the school to thank him, but he was on sabbatical. Only years later, after graduating Princeton, did I catch him in the same class—same classroom, same outfit—and thanked him for an action that inadvertently made me a better student and person. And he was noticeably upset!As a side note, I have never understood such people. They get all wrapped up in school names. I went to the schools that were best in what I wanted to learn and that had students with similar, nerdy interests. It would have been stupid NOT to apply to such schools, given my interests and y mfuture plans.Yet this guy, evidently, got rejected from MIT (though he claimed to all of us he chose University of Akron over an acceptance from MIT because “MIT was a waste of money,” (his words)) and wanted to take it out on the rest of us.But I digress…I won’t go so far as saying that Ivy League education isn’t special—it is. But that special education is not necessary, nor is it sufficient, for one to be successful and it certainly has no correlation with being a decent person.So if someone told me he was doomed because he failed to get into one of several Ivy League schools, I would wonder what’s wrong with him or her—just like I still wonder what was wrong with my high school teacher.Thanks for he A2A!