<p>Dear people,</p>
<p>I am facing a har decision and I need some advice from someone. I am currently enrolled in a small LACs as an international student. This is the second semester of my freshman year. I have recently applied to 6 schools as a transfer student for this fall (2012). The reason for this is, first and foremost, that my current school is not very academically challenging. The student body is mostly comprised of drop-outs from other colleges and/or kids who took a few years off before deciding to go back to school, resulting in an average on-campus age of 22-25. Most -but not all- of the students don't take their academic work too seriously, so even if some instructors are committed to giving us a quality education, they end up tailoring their classes to people who don't necessarily want to study, or whose intellectual skills are below average. It's been a very frustrating year for me, and I've ended up taking overload courses, auditing a couple more and writing papers for extra credit becaus I don't feel like I'm getting enough from my education. So I applied to Reed, Oberlin, Amherst, Grinnell, Kenyon and Sarah Lawrence College with the hope to find in one of them what my school lacks. I am still waiting for the admissions letters, and today everything changed...</p>
<p>I received a letter from a LAC in Massachusetts saying that I've been accepted into a Study Abroad program they have in Bhutan, a small country in the Himalayas. This is the only school in the world that has a program in Bhutan, since it's a VERY hard place to get into; the government has a strong anti-tourist policy so that visitors have to pay $200 a day just to be there, plus accommodation, meals, transportation, etc. The only two other ways to enter the country are to get a job (virtually impossible unless you speak the language- a Tibetan dialect) or to study there. If I accepted my place in the program I would be doing both; spending a semester at the only private college in the country while doing an internship at an environmental conservation institution.</p>
<p>So here's the conundrum: I have until April 1st to accept their offer, and the admission letters from the colleges I applied to won't come until May 15th. So I have no idea what to do. On one hand, it has always been my dream to go to Bhutan and I thought it would be impossible, since I don't have the money to go on my own and it's considerably better to live there for 4 months than to stay as a tourist for a week. This might very well be a once in a lifetime opportunity, since the program is only in its third year of existence and I don't know if it's gonna be around again, or if I'd even be accepted later after rejecting the offer this year. On the other hand, I know that my future could be compromised if I did not transfer to a better school. However, I do not even know if I'll be admitted into ANY of the schools I applied to, so to find out that I gave up Bhutan for nothing would be soul-crushing in many ways. I don't think it's possible to defer transfer admissions due to space availability, and I cannot defer the Bhutan offer either.</p>
<p>So could someone please, please give me some input, things to consider, insight, help to put this into perspective? I have not even told my family that I applied to transfer schools or to Bhutan, since I didn't want to disappoint them in case I was not accepted, so I don't know who else to talk to. Thanks in advance for your help :)</p>
Perhaps it is true that it could be a good idea to build up my application and apply again next year, so it would be a win-win situation. I was worried that they would not accept me aagain, but if I got in as a sophomore, maybe getting in as a junior would not be as hard… I’ll have a Skype interview tomorrow to talk to the Dean of the progrm in Bhutan about these issues and we’ll see what happens. I’ll keep you posted.</p>