<p>Okay. I’m going to try to reply to all of these, and it’ll make for a disorganized post but whatever. </p>
<p>I’m hoping to live somewhere in the northeastern area after grad school. Of course, this isn’t the most important thing: if the best job offer is from rural North Dakota, I’ll take it. The dream is doing something with Planned Parenthood in Washington DC or teaching at a small LAC up in the northeast, but again, I’ll take what I get.</p>
<p>I don’t think connections are nearly that important at this stage: I will be attending graduate school (going to apply to a lot of the schools I can’t afford/got rejected from) and it’ll be those connections and my work from the grad schools that’ll land me a job.</p>
<p>Climate? Well, I’ve lived in HI since kindergarten, but would really like to experience real winters. (I applied only to 1 school in a non-snow climate for a reason…) I think I can do tough winters, and either school will be a new experience. My reasoning is that if they’re really that bad, I only have to withstand four (or three) of them, and I’ll know that I have to live in California or Hawaii for the rest of my life. The less humid, the better, though. I do think that I’d prefer the city, probably because I live in a small college town now and am constantly bored out of my mind. Tuscaloosa is way bigger though, and I’m sure that I wouldn’t get bored there like I do here. I really do admire the intimacy and sense of community there is when the college is the highlight of the town, though. (YAY AMBIVALENCE – but literally half the colleges I applied to were slightly less remote than Williams, and the other half were smack in the middle of cities) </p>
<p>I’m sure I’d be politically fine at both campuses. I have liberal friends who go the BYUs and they find people to associate with, so if I go anywhere but Bob Jones, I think I’ll do fine. What’s concerned me more lately is the handling of sexual assault. Colleges that you’d expect to be more liberal (and thus have more male feminists), like Amherst and most recently Harvard, are getting reports of mishandling, and I’m curious as to how they’re handled elsewhere.</p>
<p>I’ll definitely try to get more info about the Honors Colleges at both universities by calling or emailing or something. </p>
<p>Regarding the finances, we could technically afford an out of pocket, aid-free education anywhere. We’d just run out of savings by doing that. My mom wants to pay only 1k per month (which is what she’d be paying if I went to BYU, but I think is kind of ridiculous because that’s like 1/4 of our EFC, but it’s not me who’s paying for this, so I guess I don’t have too much of a say, but I also do understand where she’s coming from because my parents do want to buy a house at some point). But they won’t pay for me to go visit a college for a day or two, which again, makes sense because that trip would cost about 2k. (Flying home for things that aren’t winter and summer break will also be out of the question.) I’m sure I can be happy at either college, but it’s ultimately a challenge of figuring out at which college I’ll be happier.</p>
<p>Yes, I was offered honors at both (but not UFE or CPBH (which I now regret not applying to) or Chancellor’s). I do like that Pitt offers that intro to research course and has things like the BPhil and BS (instead of BA) in social sciences, either of which I think would be advantageous in applying for a PhD right out of undergraduate school (I am terrified of dropping a lot of money on a Master’s degree and am hoping that I can get into some great PhD programs without going into immense debt). I haven’t seen too much on the Bama site on research outside of the CPBH program, which is a little concerning to me.</p>
<p>Oh wow, this was a long post. </p>
Have you joined the FB pages for admitted students? </p>