A question for (some) USians

[kiwisue]

Family stuff again, but of the good this time.

My niece is a keen rower, and is pretty good at it too (3 gold medals in various classes at the recent NZ Nationals... /auntie brag). She has the opportunity to take up a sporting scholarship to a university in the US this year and she wants to do a degree in logistics management.

So she has two offers. One from Ohio State (Columbus), the other from Michigan State (East Lansing). Both offer the courses she's after. There are a couple of other scholarship girls from NZ at Michigan. The finances are about the same. Ohio wanted an answer last week, but in view of Dad's death they've given her more time. The offer from Michigan only came in a week ago.

So... is anyone familiar with either of these universities? Any advice, anecdotes, information about them, the cities they are in, anything to help her make up her mind - I said I'd ask!

Comments

[fjbryan]

Basic things to think about:

Although the names might appear to be the same (name STATE versus name STATE) the two are very different. Michigan State is a second-tier school in Michigan, meaning that it is less-well funded in every dimension (library, buildings, athletics, you name it) than the flagship university of the state, the University of Michigan. On the other hand, Ohio State is the state flagship school of Ohio, meaning that it has the best of absolutely everything--the best labs, the best professors, the best training facilities. To get some idea of its regional standing, the major rival of the University of Michigan is...Ohio State.

There are major differences in scale: Ohio State is one of the four or five largest universities in America, with something like 80 or 90,000 students on the main campus in Columbus, whereas MSU has about 50,000 students. They are both extremely large schools, but OSU is double the size (which may have implications about the range of academic programs available, so find out what your niece wants to study and see if that matches up with what they offer).

OSU is located in the state capital of Columbus--just like MSU is in the state capital of Lansing. But Columbus is far different from Lansing. Columbus has an ethnically diverse, somewhat cosmopolitan place with about 2 million people (Lansing barely cracks 1 million, and is bland-bland-bland by comparison). That means a more vibrant city life around the campus, more restaurants, more activities off-campus that she might enjoy. Having said that, Columbus OH and Lansing MI are both midwestern cities (they are not LA or NYC, the restaurants will probably all shut at 10:30pm) that will be slightly more conservative about everything than a major metropolitan area like Philadelphia or Seattle.

Hope this helps.

[kiwisue]

Really interesting, thank you. She's after a logistics/supply chain management degree, which at MSU means a qualification in engineering (packaging), while I'm fairly sure the program at Ohio would be at Fisher, in the business college. OK, I didn't even know such courses existed when I got into this *g*.

So many variables for her to consider. I don't know if I'm being a nervous aunt or not, but she's going from a small, barely-a-city place of a bit over 50,000 people in total to somewhere where the campuses are that size or bigger. I think she'll cope, but... Anyway, will pass this on and hope it helps. Thanks again.