What To Expect + HUGE Problems Deciding

College Life
1

<p>I have applied to about 10 schools. All are Liberal Arts schools, many of them are in the SE part of the country. The schools include Vanderbilt, Furman, Rhodes, Rollins, etc. I have gotten into every school I've applied to so far. The only true reach I have is Vanderbilt - I'm not sure if my SAT scores are high enough (they're around 1250), but I have a 4.5 GPA, 6 AP classes (accumulated from 10th-12th grade), a large number of honors classes, 2 varsity sports, President of two clubs, tons of community service, etc.</p>

<p>I'm (obviously) a Senior, and I feel like my biggest concern right now is I don't know where I want to go..at all. I have a lot of scholarships, which is great, but I feel like all of the schools I've applied to fall under one of these three categories:</p>

<p>1.) Not prestigious enough
2.) Too difficult for me to be happy (Vanderbilt, perhaps?)
3.) The kids aren't my cup of tea</p>

<p>I want to have some fun, but I'm afraid I'm going to get into a school where all I do is study, I'll lose my motivation to continue studying, and I'll start doing poorly. Last semester, I spent 4-6 hours per night studying for my classes (I'm only in 3 AP classes and 2 honors classes right now, 8 classes total with no "slack" classes). It was absolute, utter hell, and I don't want to do it again. I had a similar experience in 10th grade with AP World History - an average of 6 hours of homework per night, and I still did terrible on the AP exam. I didn't want to repeat that experience, either, but here I am now, unhappy with my Senior year because my course load is too demanding and I worked too hard (I made straight-A's last semester, and I feel like it was for nothing).</p>

<p>My best friend goes to West Point and he lives on only a few hours of sleep per night. The only real feel for college I have is what he tells me about every day. He is miserable all of the time, hates his life, and can't wait to get out and go be in the field. I hear that at a "normal" college, you get a lot of free time - more than I have now in high school - and that in some cases, it's easier than high school. I'm afraid that if I have too much free time, I'll procrastinate and neglect doing my work. I'm afraid if I go to a school like Vanderbilt or Furman, I'll have so much work that I'll become miserable. I don't plan on becoming much of a drinker, so drinking away my problems on the weekends like so many students allegedly do isn't an option for me.</p>

<p>All of my other friends in college just seem to be smarter than me. I have one at Johns Hopkins who was going to go to the Air Force Academy but dropped out during Basic Training, some friends at Georgia Tech and UGA, and then some underachievers (in my eyes) that go to Georgia State, Kennesaw State University, FSU, etc. In other words, none of my friends are in the same boat as me, and they all think I'm weird for applying to small schools. I chose to do so because I don't want to be in a lecture hall, and I don't want to go to a big party school, as the drinking may have tipped you off.</p>

<p>As for concern #3, I feel like some of these really, really small Liberal Arts schools just have a bunch of nerdy, unattractive, spoiled, materialistic, and/or sheltered rich kids. It's kind of like my high school now: the kids are ultra-conservative, too religious for my own taste, spoiled, and sheltered (note: I went to a public school for 2 years and transferred to a private school in 11th grade, so I feel like I've seen everything there is to see in High School). I feel like not much will change in college - take this quotation from College Pr0wler on Rollins' girls:</p>

<p>
[quote]
“Ninety-five percent of the girls on campus are extremely hot. Reason being that they are snotty, rich, 18-year-old girls who never hesitate to max out daddy’s credit card on weekly Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Prada shopping sprees. Driving around in a Porsche, BMW, or Mercedes is normal for some of these people. It’s weird how with money at Rollins, you can still be a student—even though you’ve been caught growing pot plants in your dorm room and later that next year crashed into a residence hall because you were too drunk to drive. Other than that, the other five percent of the campus population is normal, everyday people.”

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I don't want to be around girls that are so high maintenance I can't even date them because I don't have the money. I also don't want to go to some school where all of the girls are just mediocre-looking.</p>

<p>I'm just so lost and overwhelmed by everything - I feel like college will be too demanding for me to enjoy it at all, or it will be too easy and I'll feel like I will have wasted time and money going to a college where I could have gone to a better one.</p>

<p>Does anyone else feel like this? Does anyone have any advice? I'm afraid to keep giving out the schools I applied to or any further details about myself in the event that some admissions officer notices this thread and by some cruel twist of fate, notices something that stands out in this post, and realizes who I am.. and doesn't let me into his/her college after seeing the other schools I applied to (I don't tell them on my applications). I know it's a beyond ridiculous concern, but I've come too far to let something stupid like a thread on this website destroy everything I've worked for.</p>

<p>Sorry if there are any grammar/spelling mistakes, I've been up all night worried about this and it's really late.</p>

2

<p>First, I would forget the prestige and focus on what you like about the school. You can always do an honors program at a less prestigious school and shine just as brightly as anyone at a more prestigious institution (and, in all honesty, smaller schools’ honors programs will often provide a better undergrad education than the more prestigious schools’ programs simply because most UG courses at many of those schools are taught largely by grad student instructors/GSIs or TAs and GAs while smaller institution provides you with actual professors teaching every class). If you’re at the top of your class, you’ll probably end up doing grad school or professional school anyway, and it’s where you do that that really matters! Once you’ve done grad school at Harvard, USC, Berkeley, or Stanford, nobody really cares that you started out at XYZ Four-Year College in Middle-of-Nowhere, USA.
So seriously–go wherever you’re going to be most successful!</p>

3

<p>The service academies like West Point are a completely different experience than civilian schools, so I wouldn’t take your friend’s experience there as too much of an indicator of what you’re in for.</p>

<p>First, what is it that you’re planning to do with your BA? If you want to go on to a prestigious graduate school then yes, it may be important to you that your undergraduate school have a good program in whatever it is that you’re going to be studying. That’s <em>not</em> the same thing as whether the average person on the street is going to be impressed by the name of your school. If you’re going to be trying to get into a seriously competitive job, then maybe. But for most things, you can get a good education at a school without a prestigious name and people know that.</p>

<p>Next, the general formula for how much work they expect you to be doing in your first year is 2 hours outside of class for every 1 hour in class. (Obviously, some classes take more effort, but others take less.) At a lot of schools with semester systems you are expected to take 12 to 15 credits a semester, which translates into 12 to 15 hours in class a week, plus labs and discussion sections. In other words, a full-time student should be putting in about the same amount of work as a full-time worker. An enormous number of students, however, don’t do nearly that much. In other words, given your track record, no matter what your strengths and weaknesses are there are going to be respectable majors at every school that you can do and still have a reasonable amount of downtime.</p>

<p>I absolutely loathed everyone in my high school (and, to be fair, they loathed me) and when I was looking at schools as a senior one of my criteria was that my classmates wouldn’t be caught dead there (and I ended up in a very good school that just mortified my high school). So I take very seriously the issue of fitting in socially. Of course, every school has a range of students: there are serious students at the party schools and goof-offs at the schools where “everybody” is studying all the time – and if a school is a good match for you it’s going to be a good match for other people who are like you.</p>

<p>I’d suggest that you stop worrying about these questions and ask yourself what kind of school you’d really be happy at. Is it one with famous people on the faculty? Ones with small classes? One with an absolutely fabulous pre-med program? One where you can learn Vietnamese? One where people tend to live off campus? One with an active Greek life? One with a lot of student activism? And so on. Then go look at the schools you’ve gotten into to see which ones seem as if they’d be a good match for you.</p>

<p>And when you get to campus in the fall, go in there knowing that you’re bright and hardworking and that, while different study strategies are needed in college than in high school, if you’re prepared to do a reasonable amount of work every day and you take a balanced courseload you’ll do fine. Go in there knowing that you have a lot to offer socially and check out some of the clubs and things that will be recruiting at the start of the semester, take at least one class (and preferably more) that looks really interesting to you and start chatting with classmates before and after it, and look into programs your dorm may have to help you get to know and enjoy the people you’re living with, and you’ll do fine. Go in there ready to go to office hours of professors in areas you think you might want to pursue after you get your BA and get to know them and get suggestions for extra reading, so that when you’re ready to start looking at options after college you’ve got a solid background and people who know about it, and you’ll do fine.</p>

<p>And the next time you start hearing how hard West Point is, keep in mind that you’re not going to be going to a school that is designed to break you down and then rebuild you as someone who’s prepared to lead troops into combat.</p>

4

<p>Thanks for the advice. I think I want to major in Business and minor in Psychology, but I really don’t know. All of that is up in the air right now, so it’s a good thing I’m looking at liberal arts schools I guess.</p>

<p>So just try to look at a school that I want to go to as opposed to what looks best? I never really thought about how grad school matters that much more than college. I’m afraid if I go to an easier college, however, I won’t be prepared for grad or professional school, and I won’t be able to do the work. I guess that’s something I need to figure out on my own.. I don’t know how anyone could help me with that.</p>

5

<p>Ultimately, it makes more of a difference which coursework you take than the school you go to when it comes to preparation for grad/professional school. All colleges and universities have sent a number of their students on to professional and graduate school – unless you’re talking about a JC…
So really, I wouldn’t worry about it. Go to the school where you will be most successful as a student during your college years. Somewhere you are comfortable and enjoy when you visit.</p>

6

<p>If you decide you want to go to grad school, and you don’t think that whatever school you’re already at is going to be “good enough”, you can look at transferring or at boosting your qualifications in other ways. The decision you’re making this year doesn’t lock you into or out of opportunities for life, so yeah: go to a school that can make you happy, pick a major that can make you happy, and – while certainly you should be giving some thought to marketability down the road – see where that takes you. It may very well take you somewhere you never imagined.</p>

<p>But if you really want to think about this now, you can always contact the business and psychology departments at the schools you’re looking at and ask how many of their graduates go on to pursue MBAs and PhDs and at where they’ve gone.</p>

<p>Seriously, though, there comes a time when living in a way that makes you happy now comes before living in a way that’ll get you a lot of opportunities later. For a lot of people, that time comes when they start college.</p>

7

<p>

Then why did you apply to them? Back in the fall you had 3,000 4-year colleges to choose from. Surely you could have found 5 that were prestigious enough for you, not sweatshops, and with the kind of kids you want to be friends with?</p>

8

<p>mikemac, that’s the problem. There’s 4,000 of them and that is a TON to look through. I started looking around 10th grade. Everyone around here goes to one of 4 schools and I don’t like any of them.. so I had a huge search ahead of me.</p>

<p>I also tried to focus on colleges in the South East, seeing as I live in that area of the country.</p>

<p>I just feel like any decision I make about going to college is going to be a bad one. It seems absurd that an education should cost $40,000/year. Then I think to myself, I’m supposed to be happy at the same time? How am I supposed to enjoy myself knowing my parents are tight on cash because I’m in college, and then I have a concern that I won’t be able to keep up with all of the work??</p>

9

<p>You can’t compare the service academies to any civilian college, they follow a highly regimented program designed to prepare young bucks straight out of high school for commissions as field officers. </p>

<p>Oh, and Navy > Army.</p>

10

<p>It sounds like you should over get your prestige issue, because the alternative is going to a school where you’ll get bad grades and be unhappy or be with people you don’t like and be unhappy.</p>

11

<p>

While this post is mostly true, it does contain one piece of false information that should not be propagated.</p>

<p>Army > Navy.</p>