The focus on Stanford, by the way, is because my parents would be extremely unwilling to send me to a university on the East Coast, even if it were really prestigious.
This is a curious sentence. It suggests that your parents are probably overprotective and overinvolved. Is there any more explanation to it? Are your parents paying for your education, or is there some other reason (cultural?) that they want to exert this degree of control over you once you’re an adult?
Note that this is limiting your options a lot, which is reducing your probability of succeeding at your stated goal. Nobody can count on getting into any particular prestigious university anymore; the top of the applicant pool is too saturated. This is especially true of Stanford, which I believe is widely acknowledged to be a crapshoot. (I got into UC Berkeley, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon (which I attended), UCLA, etc. etc. but was rejected from Stanford.) Applying to more places is, I suspect, going to help you more than fine-tuning 250 words of prose.
I intend to apply to as many places as I think would be useful, don’t worry, including plenty of schools that are much less of a long shot than Stanford, Ivy Leagues, etc. I love giving myself options. :)
To answer your question, the arrangement we’ve worked out is that we take out a loan, my parents start off paying it if I can’t, then once I get a job I take over the payments, and later reimburse them fully. It would cost them more financially to send me to the East Coast, but I know them well enough to know that’s not the reason they wouldn’t let me go. It’s largely cultural, I would guess, plus the fact that I don’t have any siblings and so they might have grown more attached to me than most parents would. Additionally, they’re conservative and I’m female. If I really couldn’t afford to come home regularly (which they imagine to be at least twice a month, but will probably work out to be way more rare), I think they might have nightmares about all the (scandalous, immoral) fun I could be having over the weekends and the breaks.
I do love them though, and I can’t get so angry with them for the way they were brought up. There’s no way in hell I’m going to be perfectly obedient if I’ve decided that something is safe, ethical, and worthwhile, but I’ll still care, just like I still care that my mom doesn’t like that I’m an atheist.
This is a curious sentence. It suggests that your parents are probably overprotective and overinvolved. Is there any more explanation to it? Are your parents paying for your education, or is there some other reason (cultural?) that they want to exert this degree of control over you once you’re an adult?
Note that this is limiting your options a lot, which is reducing your probability of succeeding at your stated goal. Nobody can count on getting into any particular prestigious university anymore; the top of the applicant pool is too saturated. This is especially true of Stanford, which I believe is widely acknowledged to be a crapshoot. (I got into UC Berkeley, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon (which I attended), UCLA, etc. etc. but was rejected from Stanford.) Applying to more places is, I suspect, going to help you more than fine-tuning 250 words of prose.
I intend to apply to as many places as I think would be useful, don’t worry, including plenty of schools that are much less of a long shot than Stanford, Ivy Leagues, etc. I love giving myself options. :)
To answer your question, the arrangement we’ve worked out is that we take out a loan, my parents start off paying it if I can’t, then once I get a job I take over the payments, and later reimburse them fully. It would cost them more financially to send me to the East Coast, but I know them well enough to know that’s not the reason they wouldn’t let me go. It’s largely cultural, I would guess, plus the fact that I don’t have any siblings and so they might have grown more attached to me than most parents would. Additionally, they’re conservative and I’m female. If I really couldn’t afford to come home regularly (which they imagine to be at least twice a month, but will probably work out to be way more rare), I think they might have nightmares about all the (scandalous, immoral) fun I could be having over the weekends and the breaks.
I do love them though, and I can’t get so angry with them for the way they were brought up. There’s no way in hell I’m going to be perfectly obedient if I’ve decided that something is safe, ethical, and worthwhile, but I’ll still care, just like I still care that my mom doesn’t like that I’m an atheist.