I was pretty green, too-- I had only the haziest notion of how one attained a high-profile research career when I entered college. I didn't really understand what graduate school was, nor what a PhD entailed (no, really). I knew that physicians went for more schooling after a bachelor's but nothing more than that, really. I was extremely fortunate to have an undergraduate advisor who recognized those deficits (having lived them herself, growing up where everyone she knew graduated from high school and went to work processing pineapple) and got me thinking about graduate school.
Clearly "elite college" wasn't much on my radar. Luckily a few of them were recruiting me, or I would never have applied in the first place. I got in everywhere that I applied. But times were different then, and there seemed to be less of a fixation on the Ivies, at least out here in the West. Even much-vaunted Stanford and UCB weren't necessarily viewed with the same cachet that they seem to have acquired in the intervening three decades.
