<p>Finances, ofc, are the first constraint: I’m not going to take any loans because debt can really screw someone over.</p>
<p>I go to Quora and see what sort of questions are being asked about the college + how the alumni/outside community members are answering them- and I encountered a few gems, like this:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.quora.com/Why-would-someone-choose-Carnegie-Mellon-over-Harvard”>http://www.quora.com/Why-would-someone-choose-Carnegie-Mellon-over-Harvard</a></p>
<p>It also gives you a really solid idea of what a school’s culture is like and how it fits in to the world as a whole, like this one:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.quora.com/Carnegie-Mellon-University/Why-does-CMU-not-join-in-the-MOOC-open-course-wave-as-actively-as-Stanford-Berkeley-or-MIT/answer/Kevin-Shi-21?__snids__=457430051&__nsrc__=2”>http://www.quora.com/Carnegie-Mellon-University/Why-does-CMU-not-join-in-the-MOOC-open-course-wave-as-actively-as-Stanford-Berkeley-or-MIT/answer/Kevin-Shi-21?__snids__=457430051&__nsrc__=2</a></p>
<p>Beyond that, I look for interesting projects being done by students and faculty- for example, Rice University’s engineering design kitchen increased the efficiency of the bicycle racks on public transport buses (in Houston) by 50% with some simple tweaks. MIT/etc. are ofc working on nanobatteries, and Stanford’s the source of some solid research on Brain-Machine Interfaces. Since I’ve already made it pretty obvious that I’m going to CMU next year- and at CMU, the HCI department/lab is working on the next-generation touchscreen which differentiates between knuckles, thumbs, fingers, etc., and lets you perform a broader variety of actions. Basically- are the projects there something I can get excited about? Would I want to hang around with the people working on projects like Duolingo and reCAPTCHA- and try to join them? If the college isn’t exciting, it falls to a lower spot on my list.</p>
<p>I also check out the alumni + the entering class of the year before me- and after admissions, my incoming class. The Facebook groups are really useful because there’s often content on there that bothers/disturbs/disgusts me and content on there that really attracts me. It’s a good way to get a sense of what’s right and wrong and, in my case, realize that a university is just perfect.</p>
<p>Of course, I’m only going to college for 4 years- maybe 5 if I need to or go for an IMB program. Salaries + jobs matter, but colleges more often that not leave the data pretty vague and non-specific, even when they’re as large as Berkeley (which doesn’t differentiate in its data between ECE and CSE grads just because they’re all technically EECS- and don’t even get me started on L&S CS being mixed in with the rest of L&S). I care about the job I end up with in the long run, and whether it’ll be fulfilling (i.e., whether I get to meet my goal of “making things that are worth making”) and worth getting excited about- and then I want to end up with a decent wage as well.</p>