I don’t know whether or not this will help, but I recently graduated from the Texas Tech honors program and might be able to give some insight.
I genuinely loved my experience at Tech. As with anything, there were positives and negatives. The honors college, for me, is a lot of what attracted me to Tech in the first place. I really enjoyed the classes I took through the college. On the negative side, there were few classes that would apply directly to my major, but that let me take classes I otherwise would not have and really broadened my scope of experience. I took several psychology classes, a class on Joan of Arc, a class on Travel Writing, and a class on atmospheric science. The people I met through my honors classes and my honors housing became some of my closest friends. I think there was something really special about going to class with the people you lived with. It made it easier to meet up to work on projects, but it also added to that shared experience. I lived in Gordon my freshman and sophomore year and I really missed it after I moved off campus.
While in the middle of nowhere (it took me 6 hours to drive there from the Dallas area), Lubbock is not nowhere. It has everything you could possibly want in a city and is a devoted college town. It even recently got some well-known Austin establishments like Alamo Drafthouse and Torchy’s Tacos. It’s mall is pretty basic, but it had what I needed. I found I rarely shopped anyway because I was needing to save so much money.
Overall, the biggest thing for me was the number of opportunities Tech made available to its students. It had an approach that I think is opposite many major universities. If you wanted to do something, like undergraduate research as a freshman, write for the campus newspaper your first day on campus, even intern on Capital Hill, Tech generally would let you try. You proved yourself as you went instead of having to prove yourself first. Of course, you still had to apply to these things and be accepted, but Tech would still tend to give you a try even if you weren’t the elite applicant. At least that was my experience. The mere fact that they are willing to take a chance on you allows you to grow so much. (I’m not saying that UT wouldn’t do this, but since I didn’t go there, I wouldn’t know.)
To give you an idea, I barely graduated in the top quarter of my high school graduating class, my SAT scores were ok, and my GPA was good, but not great. Through four years at Tech, I participated in a 12 person student council for my college, wrote for the student paper as a freshman (most student papers make you wait), spent a semester on Capital Hill, interned in my college’s marketing department, and two took graduate classes as an undergrad before going straight into grad school. All the while I grew so much academically and as a person.
Whether you go to UT or Tech, it’s all going to be what you make of it. Good luck, and if you have any questions, message me.