<p>I'll be attending Michigan State university.</p>
<p>I guess I did hear of the name of the school before my college search started, but it really meant nothing to me (being from Alaska). The main reason why I started hearing about MSU was thru snail mail propaganda. You'd think they wouldn't affect a person, but for me the amount of mail they sent me warranted at least a good look at the college. I eventually applied to it just for the heck of it (especially since I liked the location, not too far from all my Chicago relatives) and through the other mail/contact information they sent me it clearly became one of my top choices.</p>
<p>Has anyone heard of Gannon University? My son decided he wanted to be a physician assistant. I spent at least 20 hours looking at a list of 200 accredited programs and then going to each school's web site for details. I found a handful of accelerated programs that allow him to graduate with a BS/MA at the end of 5 years.</p>
<p>I heard about Trinity University in Texas, when an admission officer visited my school in late 11th grade. I became interested since then. In early senior year another admission officer from Trinity came to a college fair hosted by my school. That was when I said, I must apply there!</p>
<p>I have heard of Gannon. Knew a young lady who got a full athletic scholarship there. Did it, loved it and doing well. Trinity is another gem of a school we investigated, along with SMU in Texas. Those of us in the NE tend to look at most of the rest of the US as a black hole in terms of colleges except for the ones with high name recognition. This causes the bottle neck effect at the same schools we all want when there are some truly wonderful regional schools that could serve us better. I wish someone would do a Princeton Review type of book (really books) on the many colleges that do not have narrative descriptions. You can read about the well known colleges hundereds of times over, but when you look for info on Heidleberg or Defiance in OH or some of the LACs in the NW, you find little or nothing. Loren Pope has definitely made a big dent in that market but that is a mere fraction of the schools out there. I see a series of books in the making here as a great opportunity.</p>
<p>When I was traveling in the Middle East a few years ago, quite a few of my business associates had been educated in U.S. schools that were hardly well-known in the U.S., much less halfway around the world. When I asked how they had learned about these schools, the answer invariably had some kind of personal spin - an older sibling, a friend, etc., had gone there and liked it. I'm sure if I had been able to query the individual who made the recommendation, I would have found a similar path to the school.</p>
<p>I had relocated to Western PA many years ago from New England. When my kids were looking for schools, I knew a lot about schools in New England but was totally clueless about schools in PA, Ohio, Western NY, etc. The GCs and kids in our high school talked about schools like Gannon, Case Western, Ohio U, U Pittsburgh and others that were unfamiliar to me. </p>
<p>My kids decided on public universities with >10,000 students. Our first step was identifying the states in which the kids would consider going to school, and then finding all of the big public universities in those states. We then weeded this list by looking for particular majors, schools that had good male-female balances, schools that offered out-of-state students good grants, the availability of honors programs, professional school guarantees, etc. Every number was examined and compared, such as the number that graduated in 4-years, the size of libraries, retention rates, percentage living in dorms, etc. I was hoping that they would pick a campus within a four hour drive. I even used a compass on a large map to highlight schools within different driving ranges. We went on about 15 college visits for each kid...and then, after weeding out further, went on admitted student college visits. Not knowing anything about any of the schools initially, I know that I over-researched. </p>
<p>Out of the 30 or so schools to which they were ultimately admitted (including Pitt, Kentucky, UCONN, OSU, Ohio U, etc), by the time they made their final selections we were very comfortable with the choice. One kid is graduating from PSU and another kid is very happy at SUNY Buffalo. </p>
<p>Kid #3 (a HS Junior) wants to go to a large public university. Here we go again...</p>
<p>I'm going to Wellesley College in the fall, but like many people in this thread, I did not know about the college until recently. I just graduated from a public high school in Southern California where most people go to the local community college, Cal States, or UCs. If people want to go out of state, they usually apply to large public or private universities. When I started to think about college in junior year, my dad introduced me to the idea of a liberal arts college. I visited Pomona College and started to believe that a small school setting would fit me much more than a large university. During the fall of my senior year, I still hadn't finalized my list of colleges when my parents suggested applying to Wellesley College. I looked at the website a few times and saw that it's common application supplement wasn't that bad, so I just applied without giving it much thought. After getting rejected from Pomona and Stanford, my two top choices in California, I decided to look at the colleges I got accepted on the East Coast. It was only after I visited Wellesley that I realized that it was the school for me. If someone told me that I would be going to a women's college in Massachusetts a few years ago (or even a year ago), I would think he or she was crazy.</p>
<p>Being an international student, I only learned of UVA after some alumni came into my school and gave a presentation to us. Zero knowledge of the uni beforehand. Never even heard of the name. That time, UVA was only my safety school ('cos I didn't really want to go there, not because I was sure I would get in - I was clueless of how selective UVA really is). I got admitted to Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon after that, but it was only in the course of one month after I got the offers that I made serious research about UVA, and in the end decided that it seemed to be a much better school for me compared to the other two. And now I'm enrolling there!! :) </p>
<p>I still wished that UVA's rep here in Asia could be a little better, though. Almost all the time when I tell people I'm going to UVA, their responses would identically be, "Virginia Tech?!?" BIG sigh. :(</p>
<p>I started researching schools when I was in 7th grade (no joke!!) and I had/have the grades to get into a decent school (3.9, 28 act). I never would have found myself going to a state university with some of the lowest tuition rates in the country and with an average incoming GPA of 3.0 and ACT score of 19. </p>
<p>But, such is the case since I came across Adams State College in 2002, and it has been my choice school ever since (and I'll be applying this fall). I currently live in Wisconsin, and I had no idea that there was a school so close to my father's house. Honestly, when I found out about the place I was kinda stunned, because the town only has 10,000 people in it....</p>
<p>So, yeah, I never would've envisioned myself going to this place, at least not when I first started looking at schools!</p>
<p>I'm going to Dartmouth, which wasn't on my list when I first formed it in the summer of '07. I of course heard of the Ivy League by then, but I didn't know very much about individual colleges in the Ivy League. I went on the-u.com to check out some of the colleges, and then I looked at some of the video tours on there. I looked at Dartmouth and decided that even though it was a bit more rural than I would like, I would apply there because everything else sounded right for me and it didn't require an extra essay. </p>
<p>After I kind of looked at things, I realized that Dartmouth was my first choice for a lot of reasons, and a lot of the other schools I applied to weren't very nice to me (Yale didn't offer me an interview, which it very well could have and my dad and someone from the Cornell Office of Financial Aid got into a bit of an argument over some financial documents....) My Dartmouth interviewer was really nice and chill, which I really liked. :P</p>
<p>My parents headed to Texas last summer and dragged me and my siblings along because they wanted to visit their roots (before moving up here to DC)--which was mostly around the Texas A&M area. Then we visited UT-Austin, as we have a lottt of family around there and my parents wanted me to apply.</p>
<p>Last summer was essentially a brief roadtrip around Texas--we went thru Corpus Christi and Houston in addition to Austin. I had never heard of Rice before; actually, maybe a VERY slight mention, just that it's really hard to get into and it's a college in Texas and since we were in Houston for several days my parents and I were like, "Hey, why don't we go visit?"</p>
<p>Fell in LOVE with Rice on the spot with its gorgeous Spanish Mediterranean architecture and excellent academics and 5:1 student-faculty ratio, but mostly b/c of its uniquely integrated residential college system.</p>
<p>It ended up being one of my top choices and now I'll be going there this fall. :)</p>
<p>I started doing college research for my D when she was in 9th or 10th grade--because I had the time and mostly because her criteria were so specific--small liberal arts school, not more than 700 miles from home, fine arts program including ceramics, environmental science program, availability of equestrian as a club sport--and that's just a partial list. I used the Fiske guide, princetonreview.com and the CTCL book. The search was even more challenging because there was a disparity between her grades and her SAT scores--but one school emerged as a clear first choice. After visiting 8 schools, we went back for a second look at Number 1. She applied and was accepted ED and she's off to college in 6 weeks.</p>
<p>Mine is sort of a funny story:
I had never considered applying to USC when my math teacher (junior year) informed me that a USC rep was giving a presentation at that time in the college room. I simply informed him that I already had the list of colleges to apply to planned and so it was pointless to go to the presentation as I would never apply there anyway.</p>
<p>When senior year came around and it was time to really narrow down the list, I started to look for schools that give big scholarships. Thus, I ended up taking a second look at USC and after researching it a bit more, fell in love with it, and now here I am.</p>
<p>The college I'm attending I've never heard of when I started my college search at the middle of my Junior Year. At the time, I had no idea where to start looking for colleges because I'm the first in my entire family to go, so I had no idea of small liberal arts colleges, and only knew of local colleges and universities, of which many didn't appeal to me. I did a college match up with Princeton Review, which gave me Marist College as my number one choice. I started looking, and the more I saw the pictures, interviews, and curriculum, the more I liked it. What sealed it for me was the campus tour and info session. I applied and was accepted Early Action, and that's when my senioritis started showing itself, but, I still kept my grades high enough to graduate 3rd in my class.!!</p>
<p>My mother, who works for Johnson and Johnson, also informed me of Carnegie Mellon University. At first, I just thought it was some school in Pennsylvania. It is in PA, but, its highly ranked and revered. I was actually intimidated to apply, cause I thought I couldn't get in or survive. But, when I went to visit, CMU jumped to my number one slot. I was waitlisted, which only made my decision more difficult cause I had to decide between a strong, global name, or small size with a strong local name. The decision was however made for me, because they did not pull anyone off of the waitlist this year.</p>
<p>I'm really grateful for the tools available online, they helped alot, and they may help me when I plan on applying for transfer admission to CMU in March.</p>
<p>I am going to Tufts University, and honestly, I have never heard of this school before until last summer, when I met with my college adviser in this free college-advising program that I joined. Originally, I set my bars pretty low with UConn, Northeastern, University of Hartford, Mass.College of Pharmacy/health sciences, and University of Rhode Island. But then my college advisor introduced me to colleges like Smith College and Tufts University, two schools that I've never heard of but were reach schools. I decided to keep an open mind and apply to Tufts, even though I thought that it was a pretty high reach, and when I got accepted and visited, I fell in love with everything about Tufts. I'm proud to be a Jumbo!</p>
<p>Wow, Neonzeus, that is so great. I have a student at SUNY Buffalo too. We also looked at Penn STate. We were a family that really did not want a big uni,very much LAC oriented, but son is doing fine up there.</p>
<p>A couple of family friends who know my S well recommended Harvey Mudd as bveing an excellent fit for him -- they were absolutely right. Mudd was the baseline for his college search, and he sought to find more schools like it -- quirky, intense math, excellent humanities. Reed and Chicago popped up immediately. S visited Chicago on a long snowy January weekend, called me from the Quad and said, "I could see spending four years here." The only other school he said that about was Mudd. At that point, we knew it would be on the list.</p>
<p>He spent a lot of time crafting his list, and after April of junior year, he only added one school to it. (He dropped three after great EA results.) This made April of senior year harder, but had he strong, legit reasons for every school on his list, which is why it was hard to decline.</p>
<p>Ultimately, he turned down MIT and a full ride at the flagship and agonized between Mudd and Chicago. He took Chicago, and we are all thrilled, but I remain convinced that he would have just as fabulous an experience at Mudd.</p>