<p>Where did you go to college and how did you make your decision to go there? Please, share your story. This thread is open to anyone-whether you graduated decades ago or whether you just enrolled yesterday. How did you decide?</p>
<p>My story is most ironic. In January 1980, I was a senior at a mid-level boarding school. I had good grades, but for “non-academic” reasons, I got kicked out. Because the school was on trimesters, and my hometown high school was on semesters, I would not be able to earn my diploma there by spring, so I didn’t even try. I just got a GED.</p>
<p>I contacted all the schools I’d applied to and explained the situation. The two schools that had already accepted me told me I was no longer welcome. All but one of the other schools eventually sent me rejections. The one college that accepted me was Vassar.</p>
<p>Yup. The most elite of all the schools I applied to is the only one that took me. They never even asked to see my GED.</p>
<p>1) Follow your heart
2) Look at the college’s reputation for jobs
3) Check things like whether labs are good, research experiences are available or not, how good is the academics
4) see things like drugs, alcohol consumption, social life, things to do around campus
5) Try some new place if you can afford
6) Visit the college no matter what.</p>
<p>How can the healthy ego resist? I really didn’t want to go to college and I really didn’t want to go thru the whole process of finding a college, but the pressure from my parents and my school was intense. So when the first campus I stepped on felt right I figured it would do and applied only there. It was a small and small town LAC, Pietist in origins, but I figured I could grow to like any place–that it was me, not the place. Big mistake for someone who liked ideas and the humanities and the sciences but not (what seemed like at the time) pre-meds and goal-oriented, narrow-minded rurals who’d never read a city paper let alone On the Origin or Bocaccio.</p>
<p>Great stories so far! Keep 'em coming!</p>
<p>For my transfer school, I googled a ranking of geology programs, looked at which universities were guarentee to accept me, and then compared the Jewish life offerings at the final schools. Initially, my list consisted of the University of Oklahoma but then I realized that I should have one more option so I applied to the University of Arizona. When the time to decide came around, I lied to my parents, told them I only applied to OU, and a month and a half later drove almost 1,000 miles to my new school (btw, the day before I started classes was the first time I’d even stepped foot in Oklahoma).</p>
<p>Nobody else has a story to share?</p>
<p>So this is my transfer story. I leave the small LAC mentioned in #4, or rather the dean interrupts a party to ask me to leave in person. I return long enough to raise my GPA to a 2.51, but I run outta money. I spend 4 years in an industrial plant working three shifts until I’m ready to do anything else but show upto work. Cheap western state school I’ve visited requires a 2.5 to transfer in. I’m in luck. I work for a year and get in-state residency. Last 3 semesters there, the Chancellor sends me $400 for my 4.0. It was like going for free, except for being a janitor in the evenings and laying asphalt mwf ;+) I graduate in four semesters, marry, and move back east for my phd. Send the registrar a present for taking a chance on me.</p>
<p>wow, please don’t do what i do but I had a mad crush on a boy who had just graduated from a college one state over from where we all lived. Even though he barely knew I was alive, I got it into my head that if <em>I</em> attended that school,then we would have something in common and he would fall madly in love with me.</p>
<p>But here’s the positive end of that story – the college turned out to be the most amazing 4 years of my life and influenced every single career and personal success that I had in my life going forward. And, no, i never did get that guy to notice me.</p>
<p>:)</p>
<p>Wow, jkeil, that’s a crazy story you have! I guess everything does turn out for the best. And Hope, that’s a pretty funny story, and I’m glad you enjoyed yourself. </p>
<p>I also liked your story, too, Wasatch. From my perspective, it’s kind of cool to see just a glimpse into the life of someone that I will never meet.</p>
<p>Ok. I’m an old fart but I’ll bite and share my story. I grew up in the Boston suburbs. It was February of my senior year, 1977. I had applied to UMass, BU, Tufts, Georgetown, and maybe one other place. I got in everywhere except Georgetown. I was pretty much decided on going to Tufts. My baseball coach knew the coach at Tufts and said I could probably make the team. Anyway, we had this massive blizzard. We were snowed in. It was a Sunday afternoon and I was bored. There was golf on t.v. Beautiful sunshine, green grass, palm trees, and cute blond girls in shorts. It was the Tucson open. The next day I got to school early and asked the guidance counselor if there were any universities in Tucson. Viola! University of Arizona she said. I mailed a request for a catalog and application (that’s how we did it back in the caveman days). I mailed in my application the same day I got it. Two weeks later I received my acceptance letter and never looked back. I was thrilled with the whole adventure until I got off the plane in Tucson. It 3 pm on a day in late August. In those days, Tucson Int’l did not have tubes. You walked down one of those portable stairways onto the tarmac. (Yeah, there were probably dinosaurs roaming around too.) With the first breath, I think I seared my nasal passages and lungs. It must have been 140 degrees. I graduated in four years, moved to California for law school, and have never been back to Tucson since. I hate the desert.</p>
<p>Nothing academic about my decision.</p>
<p>I lived in Ohio and was desperate to get out. I thought going to Alaska would be a fun adventure, so I enrolled at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Loved it, got my degree, and never regretted the decision.</p>
<p>UAF gets lots of students like that.</p>
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<p>Oh, man, no kidding. The dorm at my boarding school had one communal copy of a Barrons’ Guide to colleges. To find a college you liked, you hit the indexes and cross-referenced things like majors, clubs, size, etc. What a hassle. Then you literally wrote letters to the college asking for information. Some schools sent skimpy brochures, others sent the whole catalog. Very few color pictures, lots of bureaucratic language, and of course no videos.</p>
<p>I think we trusted word of mouth a lot more back then, too. If an older kid came back and told us he/she was having a good experience, that could make a lot of difference. In fact, that was how I got interested in my eventual choice in the first place. A girl I knew came back for homecoming and raved about the place.</p>
<p>If we’d had the Internet – who knows?</p>
<p>Wasatch – Yeah, and we didn’t do college visits either. All of the schools I applied to were within a 60 mile radius of where I lived, but I never even visited them before applying. The only place I visited was Georgetown and that’s because my best friend was also applying there, I had a car, and he begged me to drive us down there together to check it out. It was a great adventure for two high school seniors. It’s amazing we made it back to MA in one piece. My parents had no interest in where I was applying as long as it didn’t cost too much. They were happy when I chose U of A because the out-of-state tuition and travel was still a lot less than Tufts.</p>
<p>I chose a lot of different colleges I liked, with varying degrees of selectivity. I got into some mentioned in CC, and got rejected by some. I also got a full ride to my safety, a LAC that is also mentioned here (although much less frequently :p). I had a feeling I’d love it due to my thorough research on it (which I realized later could have been very misled!) and from contact with professors and students - no money for college visits at all, it was really unthinkable - I knew I’d picked it earlier for special programs that I found intellectually exciting, and that my parents would barely have enough money for the plane ride, fees, and books, so I didn’t even hesitate : I decided not to take on any loan and go to the full ride college. It was the best decision I’ve ever made. Graduating debt-free gave me a wide variety of choices I wouldn’t have had otherwise, I found my best friends there, I got to know my professors and work on research and even TA, I was more challenged than I thought I could be (not even the same planet as high school), and I had an awesome time. :)</p>
<p>I wound up with my school because it was the last one on the list. I basically had three choices imposed on me due to my parents unwillingness to pay for anything else and my compliance with those wishes, State, State Tech, and Elite U. I eliminated State because it didn’t have that good a reputation for producing engineers compared to State Tech. Elite U would have required I use a full-ride Air Force ROTC scholarship, which I had, but I never felt comfortable there, I really didn’t want to dual major and have 22 hours per semester, and ultimately, I didn’t want to have to serve four years in the military in the early '80s. So that left State Tech - which I despised because it had a male-female ratio of 4:1, but it was all that was left and time had run out.</p>
<p>Ultimately, engineering was probably a mistake as I felt like it was imposed on me, but I am proud of my engineering degree, even if I no longer use it. And although I might have made better choices, I ultimately can’t complain about what I’ve got regarding my family, and if that’s the case, a little suffering along the way is nothing. I’m just determined for my kids not to make the same mistakes and try to do a much better job of advising them.</p>
<p>Thanks for the responses everyone. MYOS, I’m sort of in the same boat. I applied to three different selective universities of varying degree and also four state universities. I anticipate that I will get into most of them. If I go to one particular state uni, I will practically have a full ride. At any other state uni, it will be fairly inexpensive (Yay Florida Bright Futures!), but at the three more selective colleges, it will surely be more expensive. I’m not really sure how I will decide right now, but I’ve got a little time :)</p>
<p>Anyone else care to share?</p>
<p>I want to specify that essentially my choice was between a good LAC and a top LAC, not between two different types of universities. In fact it would have cost me more to go to the state university and it really wouldn’t have been a good fit for me at all.
It also depends on the size of the debt and how much your parents can pay. Don’t choose the “free” school over fit, but figure out a way to have fit at the lowest possible cost. Look for colleges that are very similar to your favorite one, but slightly less selective. Typically, every college has a “similar enough” version about 15 or 20 or 25 ranks below and that may be the perfect match. As I said, even though the college in question was not so highly ranked as the other ones, it was still intense and challenging, with special programs (including special interdisciplinary courses, writing an honors thesis, having to “teach a class” to show mastery, etc) I tried to get a good idea of special/offbeat/popular classes including outside my major (which I changed anyway), the type of students there (if you hate being the only one who’s done the reading, it’s crucial - level of engagement is important, and there’s an actual NSSE survey about it. Schools that do well on it boast about it so it’s easy to figure out:) even if it’d be easier to actually see the results all on one page.) Most of all, apply to several schools with similar characteristics.
For example in Florida you have New College and Harriet Wilkes which would likely be free or very cheap, plus Honors College at most public universities. Outside of Florida, you stand a better chance of scholarship in the Midatlantic and the Midwest, plus probably the Pacific Northwest, so take your Fiske Guide, INsider’s guide, or princeton review’s to the colleges, and look into those.
Random schools for you to check out: Earlham, Hiram, Wooster, Allegheny, Muhlenberg, Dickinson, Kenyon, Adelphi, Whitman, Willamette, St Lawrence, Lawrence, St Olaf, Beloit, Union, Skidmore, perhaps even Centre, Rhodes, and Hendrixwhich are in the South. I know Hendrix gives a lot of merit money.</p>
<p>My mom went to Adelphi! So far, I have applied to Emory, UMiami, Tulane, UF, FSU, UCF, and I have already been accepted into USF and they’re offering me $22,000 distributed throughout four years. I don’t think that I have any plans to apply to anywhere else, but that could always change.</p>