Life-changing decisions pertaining to education. Help.

I'm confused and depressed

Not the best state of mind to make long-term decisions in. It seems that you are asking wrong questions. Why are you "confused and depressed" instead of excited about having several great opportunities to choose from and eager to enjoy the world? What are you afraid of? What's the worst that could happen? How hard would it be to change direction if you find that your chosen path is not working out? What skills do you need to recognize it and be able to correct it? This last question is what this forum is best equipped to answer. You might find that, once you are confident in being able to steer your career in the right direction, instead of flying ballistic after the initial push, your anxiety about making a wrong choice and ruining your life forever will ease and let you think clearly.

Point 1: If you have specific schools you're choosing from you should just say them, but as is your statements about cost and quality of education in britain and america don't make any sense.

Point 2: If you care about learning the college you go to is a lot less important than your own effort and energy. Lectures are inefficient at teaching, and you can learn almost any field through diligent reading. The most important difference between colleges is prestige.

I had a very long post before Firefox crashed and ate it. Long story short: Find out exactly how much debt is 'negligible' before doing anything else.

1) How much can your parents pay per year? I've never known a single foreign student who wasn't able to show ability-to-pay prior to acceptance.

2) Foreign students rarely get financial aid and never get loans without a cosigner. Do you have a US/UK cosigner? Does this mean your parents will be taking out a personal loan (at higher APR) in Hungary to pay for your tuition?

3) What sort of debt burden can they handle if you drop out? What sort of debt burden are you comfortable with if you graduate?

4) What is your contingency if something goes wrong (eg father laid off) for each schooling location?

Example, you mention Bowdoin university as a university you are considering. Bowdoin's total cost in 2009-2010 was $50,485 to out-of-state students. Assuming $2000 in travel expenses a year, and ~$2500 incidentals you end up with 55k a year. Lets say you get a 11% APR[1], because you likely won't be getting US Govt subsidized loans[2] and would require your parents to cosign in Hungary. You're ~8% likely to drop out[3] and it will cost you on average $58k. You're ~92% likely to graduate, and it will cost you on average $261k. That's approximately 201,000 Euros, minus whatever your parents can pay.

If $260k in debt for a US school is 'negligible' I shudder to consider UK costs. (Though, upon research it seems they're actually cheaper than US schools and I'm left wondering how much research you've given to this topic.) Further, the idea that you'd just 'squat' somewhere is simply insane. Such an action would drastically increase your chance of dropping out, which is a ridiculous option versus a comparatively sure thing at home in Hungary, and as noted above, dropping out is expensive too.

In summary: Double check to see if going abroad is feasible and actually calculate the cost before going any further.

[1] I don't know the Hungary rates, but I assume they're similar to US rates.
[2] Subsidized loans are currently 6.8% and would subtract about 15k from the total cost. Plus they have other benefits compared to personal loans (tax deductions, grace periods, etc) that measure in the tens of thousands. [3] Bowdoin has particularly good graduation rates; some colleges don't (eg, at Purdue only 40% of students graduate within 4 years). Even a small change in graduation rates can drastically increase costs.

One difference I haven't seen mentioned: in American liberal arts colleges, you can pretty much mix and match any combination of courses you want as long as you reach a certain (small) required number of courses in your major (which you don't have to decide until halfway through or so, and can always change with minimal penalty). In England (disclaimer: I've never studied there, but I've studied in Ireland which I think is similar) you get accepted to one course and with a few exceptions you've got to just study that. If you're a dilettante who likes experiencing a little bit of everything, America might be better for you. On the other hand, many American colleges require that you take a certain amount of everything, and if you know what you want and don't want to waste time satisfying a Literature or a Foreign Languages requirement, you might prefer the English system. Obviously I know nothing about Hungary.

If you decide to stay in Hungary and pursue medicine, you might be interested in the local equivalent of an MD/Ph.D program. It would allow you to have the MD and therefore the career prospects, while still being involved in pure research. I think becoming a doctor and then spending the rest of your life in academia is probably at least as easy as getting a Ph.D in biology and then living comfortably in academia (source: wild guess) and you would have the MD to fall back on if the academia didn't work out. The only thing you'd have to worry about is being able to make it through medical school and maybe a few years of regular medical practice while you built up your research credentials enough to switch to full-time academic work. I know nothing about the Hungarian system, but some residencies in the States have specific "research tracks" for people who want to end up in academia.

I've been long time thinking about asking whether we could have something like a "Ask the LWers" thread where you could post personal questions in hope to get some helpful rational outside view.

In my experience, university in England is rife with soul-crushing bureaucracy, relative to the USA.

You've already been accepted to particular schools, I assume? I think that matters at least as much as which countries they're in.

I always thought American universities were better than British.

What specific schools did you have in mind?

Can you see yourself minoring in computer science and majoring in biology? Bioinformatics is likely to get huge with personal genomics just having started its very own Moore's Law curve, and it's likely that many interesting jobs will become available that won't involve as much academic competition as traditional biology research positions. Less intense academic competition means less damage from having graduated from a no-name university.

Go with Biology.

Where do you currently live?