<< do you have qualifying grades?>> Good question. Do you also have a TOEFL score or date that you'll take the test?

The cheapest way to do the trip is to hitchhike. As a young woman in a foreign country, you should not.

The other fact is that none of the eight Ivies (or the Seven Sisters, or the other exclusive private colleges in the Northeast) will have a climate akin to Portugal. Do you know what a winter in New Hampshire (Dartmouth) or Central New York (Cornell) would be like? Do you have the cold tolerance for it, especially in a small college town like Ithaca or Hanover (Brown, Columbia, Harvard and Penn are all in or near major cities; Princeton and Yale are short train rides from Philly (Princeton) and New York (both).

Agree that you should be considering climate. One of our DDs attended ivies - undergrad and law school - but she is used to real winter.

You might want to look at some top schools in other parts of the country. For instance Stanford and Berkeley in CA are both top quality and probably at least as difficult to get into. And there are other great schools depending on your major interest.

Can you rent a car?

I graduated from Dartmouth and MA from Penn.

My husband's BIL graduated from Cornell and lives in Ithaca.

Keith and I were there for Thanksgiving.

Beautiful new Wegman's in Ithaca and lots of nice restaurants!

I haven't been up to Hanover in 20
years!

Not much to do, Hood Museum maybe.


Wouldn't you rather just stay in Philadelphia and visit Penn, Drexel,
Temple, St. Joe's, Rosemont, Bryn MAWR, and nearby Princeton?

You could take the train from 30th Street Station to Penn STATION in New York City to visit Columbia, NYU, Sarah Lawrence, Cooper Union, FIT, New School, Parsons, etc.

As someone wrote above, there are many prestigious colleges in the US that aren't in the Ivy League.

Think about it.


Thin