<p>Hello!</p>
<p>So this exercise will be simple. If you would, just consider which colleges you would most want to attend if you were admitted to all of them and make a list ordering them by their desirability to you. It would be kind of you to list your favorite thirty or top twenty. </p>
<p>If this thread survives, it should show us a personal preference ranking. I absolutely expect regionalism and loyalty, so it would be very helpful if you could provide your general location (northeast, southwest, etc.) and what you are (student, parent, single, troll, etc.). </p>
<p>When we are done, I will average out all the preferences by location and status and give us a desirability ranking of CC users. </p>
<p>Thanks! I apologize if this is illegal or against etiquette.</p>
<p>Schools we want to go to, or schools we’re actually applying to? Big difference.</p>
<p>Sorry about that. You can choose any schools. </p>
<p>Did you apply to thirty schools? ;)</p>
<p>I’ll go first. I’m shy so don’t laugh. :)</p>
<p>*Northwest<a href=“for%20now”>/i</a>, *Senior<a href=“also%20for%20now”>/i</a>. </p>
<ol>
<li> Yale</li>
<li> Harvard</li>
<li> Stanford</li>
<li> Princeton</li>
<li> Dartmouth</li>
<li> Williams</li>
<li> MIT</li>
<li> Caltech</li>
<li> Columbia</li>
<li>Amherst</li>
<li>Penn</li>
<li>Brown </li>
<li>Duke</li>
<li>Swarthmore</li>
<li>UChicago</li>
<li>Northwestern</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
<li>Vanderbilt</li>
<li>Notre Dame</li>
<li>Harvey Mudd</li>
<li>Pomona</li>
<li>Rice </li>
<li>Emory</li>
<li>Middlebury</li>
<li>UVA</li>
<li>Claremont McKenna </li>
<li>Bowdoin</li>
<li>Johns Hopkins</li>
<li>Carleton</li>
<li>Georgetown</li>
</ol>
<p>Edit: I just realized that I unwittingly discriminated against all da publics. 
Imma hypocritical snob! <em>Bursts into tears</em></p>
<p>I dream that educators around the world would get with the times, utilize the full capacity of audiovisual media to communicate knowledge and ideas through the widest possible spectrum of human perception, actually put some effort into organizing material topically instead of sequentially out of respect for students’ time, and publish it in a way that connects with all other open-source educational media in existence, dissolving such institutions as curriculum, full-time enrollment, and degrees. Khan Academy has the right idea but you can only do so much with multicolored freehand lines on a small canvas.</p>
<p>It’s hard to have a dream school when you realize how much potential is wasted.</p>
<p>So, I’ll put you down for Reed?</p>
<p>That was brilliant, by the way. :)</p>
<p>I live in SoCal</p>
<p>Only “dream school” is
- UCLA</p>
<p>Northeast rising senior
My list in order of preference:</p>
<ol>
<li>Princeton </li>
<li>Swarthmore</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Amherst</li>
<li>Wellesley</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>BU</li>
</ol>
<p>Northeast, Junior</p>
<p>Mmm…I can’t give a specific order. Most of my ‘dream schools’ I haven’t researched enough to put them in order.</p>
<p>Duke, Case Western, Claremont, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Elon, USC, UCB, Northwestern, Brown, Tulane</p>
<p>(You know a person is confused when UMinnesota and an Ivy are on the same list)</p>
<p>They do have many similarities now that I think about it.</p>
<p>Thanks for the responses, everyone.</p>
<p>Midwest, student, junior.</p>
<p>If we’re going by career aspirations? </p>
<ol>
<li>Stanford (because it’s ******* beautiful there)</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
</ol>
<p>Or where I’d be happiest?</p>
<ol>
<li>Ohio State (I’ve met the coolest, most free-thinking and fun people on my visits there)</li>
<li>University of Maryland College Park (one of the most beautiful campuses I’ve ever seen)</li>
</ol>
<p>And that’s basically it.</p>
<p>Well, it’s preference. So would you prefer to be happy or careery?</p>
<p>Probably happy in the short term, but careery in the long term. sure, a great 4 years would be awesome, but I’d much rather be retired by the time I’m 50.</p>
<p>Retired?! I’ll be wrapping up Med school by age 50.</p>
<p>It’s an admirable mix though. You would probably like Brown, the happy Ivy. They have their own special concoction of happy and careery.</p>
<p>Northeast Senior going to Georgetown in the fall who has trouble actually thinking of schools he would want to go to…</p>
<ol>
<li>Georgetown</li>
</ol>
<h2>2. UChicago</h2>
<ol>
<li>UCLA</li>
</ol>
<h2>4. Stanford</h2>
<h2>5. NYU Abu Dhabi</h2>
<ol>
<li>NYU</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Northwestern</li>
<li>UCB</li>
<li>USC</li>
</ol>
<p>Now honestly, the first two are really the only ones that I wanted to go to, UCLA was conditional on my living in California, Stanford just because, NYUAD because it was once my dream school, and 6-10 for filler.</p>
<p>No preference other than my first. </p>
<ol>
<li>Barnard!!! (Dream school) </li>
<li>Smith</li>
<li>Wellesley</li>
<li>NYU</li>
<li>Bryn Mawr</li>
<li>Case Western</li>
<li>Brandeis</li>
<li>Lehigh</li>
</ol>
<p>Location: New Jersey
Intended Major: Neuroscience -> Biology if no Neuroscience
Career Path: Premed</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Columbia does not approve of that designation.</p>
<p>Stanford
Gtown
Berkeley
CMU
berkeley
ucsb
Ucsd</p>
<p>
If the word on the street is to be believed, Reed is one of the few colleges where I think it would be pretty cool to spend a few years just studying and talking to people just for the sake of the “college experience”.</p>
<p>And I think it’s awesome that they refuse to play the US News & World Report’s game.</p>
<p>Actually, now that I think about Reed, here are some colleges that I think could be valuable just for the college experience:</p>
<p>Reed College, because they’re Reed and because they have a goddamn nuclear reactor
Caltech, because no school could survive on the honor system without a very mature student body
MIT, because hacker culture originated there and is still strong there</p>
<p>And that’s about it.</p>
<p>^I love it. US News currently has Reed at 75 just out of spite. </p>
<p>You might like Rose-Hulman, Cooper Union, or the Webb Institute.</p>