<p>As my daughter pulls her hair out -- analyzing every minute detail of the schools she's considering -- I got a good laugh the other day remembering my own college selection process 30 some odd years ago. My final four schools were: a school in Colorado I knew nothing about except that my sister went there, an Ohio LAC that I liked because the town was cute, an Ivy I applied to because I thought it would sound cool, and a school in Connecticut I applied to because having grown up in the Midwest I thought it would be fun to live in a state where the zip code started with a "0." I kid you not. I was waitlisted at the Ivy, but then my parents got worried about the political activism and the fact that the school did not have a Greek system, about which I cared nothing. Ultimately I got in everywhere. I went back and forth and then one night had a dream about the Ohio school, which included something about Neil Young singing "Southern Man" on the campus, and woke up feeling like it was the right choice. I turned down the Ivy, headed to Ohio, and everything turned out just fine. Sometimes is helps to remember that we were young once too, and that somehow things have a way of working out.</p>
<p>Haha, your reason will be hard to beat!</p>
<p>Great idea for a thread. :)</p>
<p>I was accepted to three colleges in 1972 (the only three I applied to, which was not unusual in those days). One was my state U, which was OK but I mostly included that in an early version of "pick a safety school": I did want to spread my wings a bit and that wouldn't have been the place. One was out in the middle of nowhere (at least in the view of this suburban NJ girl at the time) with lots of snow and I didn't know how to ski very well and was a little concerned I'd be out of my element. And the one I chose was in a city (gasp! never lived in a <em>city</em> before!), which honestly I chose over the other two for... a little spot in the woods that I found when I visited. I traveled there by bus and spent a weekend walking through campus during their spring fair, then sat by myself, writing in my ever-present journal, on a bench on a little wooded path on campus where it was completely quiet. </p>
<p>The feeling I had sitting on that bench in the woods was why I chose that school.</p>
<p>Many more experiences afterwards confirmed that I'd made the right choice, but at the time it wasn't a very "scientific" or rational way to make that big decision.</p>
<p>My father limited my college list to schools that played VMI in sports. Not really out of malice but because that was all the life exposure to college he had, and we lived in a very chauvinistic world, a man's world on military bases when the women's movement was a not accepted concept. On my college search trip, we somehow had to go to VMI in the 70s mind you and drive around campus while my Dad teared up, because my father clearly wanted a child to go there but he only had daughters. No it didn't make any sense. He was very uninformed about colleges for women, my mother had no education and the even more macabre factor was that my guidance counselor in high school was a very strange introverted Bob Jones University graduate who seemed to not know anything about the world outside his very limited life experience. I didn't know anything about Bob Jones either. We didn't have the internet in those days.<br>
I kept my mouth shut. No woman in my family had ever even been to college so the fact that we were even on a two day car trip to look at colleges for a daughter was enough great news for me. I knew I would be able to make my break the next year. Only five members of my high school class were in a residential college in the fall of the next year. What I remember most was how women were still in very tiny numbers at Davidson, and the University of Virginia. How there were almost no female professors or deans. And how my father the AF fighter pilot would never look at a map so our attempt to see Wake Forest led us to Wake Forest, NC. Wake of course is in Winston Salem.<br>
I ran into Pat Conroy one day in Charleston a few years ago. My picture with him is a favorite treasure.</p>
<p>Ivory - Wonderful idea for a thread! Thank you!</p>
<p>My "most ridiculous reason" came in two stages. Stage oe was asking my GC which schools he thought would be best for me. He recommended an all-black institution. Since the GC was obviously clueless I turned to my father. In what was apparently the most colossal misunderstanding of our relationship, my dad thought he was recommending school A while I heard "You're going to school B." Off to school B I went, and the most positive thing I can say about the experience is that it was short.</p>
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<p>... and a school in Connecticut I applied to because having grown up in the Midwest I thought it would be fun to live in a state where the zip code started with a "0."
Great comment. If CC had a "Classic Comments" thread, this one would be on it.</p>
<p>1977, Western Washington State University...I LOVED the pcture on the cover of their catalog!</p>
<p>Sunset over the Puget Sound, with tall evergreens ringing the shoreline. </p>
<p>While the campus does sit above the sound, the part of the picture they didn't capture was the HUGE Georgia-Pacific paper plant that was the bulk of the "view" and the stench from that plant was horrible.</p>
<p>Oh well, I was out of state and they gave me a full ride. Can't complain too much.</p>
<p>i almost chose a school just because i liked their basketball team. not that i ever played basketball, i just wanted to sit in the student section. my guidance counselor talked me out of that one..</p>
<p>I applied to a large Ivy, a prestigious LAC (both of which were near my home), as well as three other LACs, one of which was my Mother and Sister's alma mater (making me a legacy). Applying to 5 colleges in 1976 was very unusual. I was accepted to all 5. Since the area around my home was very hilly, and I was sick of hills, I decided to got to the college that had the flattest campus, and it just happened to be the farthest away from my home.</p>
<p>Although it seems ridiculous now, I looked at the map of the California schools and choose the one that was the farthest away from my parents and my hometown. It turned out to be a great decision and I never looked back.</p>
<p>I too applied to three universities-UBuffalo(in state uni), Penn State, and Ohio State. I do not have the slightest clue why I chose any of them other than the fact that they all had engineering colleges. Never visited a single one and after getting accepted to all three chose OSU because of the enormous college catalogue they mailed me. It was probably 500+ pages with about 8 b&w pictures.</p>
<p>And yes, I loved my years at OSU and can't see how I could have been happier anywhere else.</p>
<p>I picked U of Ill/Urbana-Champaign because it was the only option I new about that would allow me to live away from home...</p>
<p>I simply didn't know about other schools or financial aid; I'd heard of the schools that had football and basketball teams that made the newspapers, and Northwestern, which was about 5 blocks from where I went to HS...</p>
<p>My parents had no money (we were border-line poverty-level), so paying for college was a huge issue...there was no way UCLA (my first choice, largely because it was as far away as I could think of) was in the picture...there just wasn't the money to get me there, much less pay the tuition/room & board...</p>
<p>I didn't know anything about the availability of any scholarship other than Nat'l Merit (which I got)...The GC at my HS had advised me I was far too stupid to think about going to college (I was a Nat'l Merit finalist, at the HS on a scholarship awarded to the #1 (in grades) elementary school student for all 8 years)...stupid tho I may be, I was smart enough to know I was not too stupid to go to college! But it tells you something about the GC "assistance" available to me. </p>
<p>Neither of my parents had attended college, and they didn't know much about colleges, and we were "poor." And I wanted more than life itself to move out of my parents' house...of course, when I got to Urbana, I was so homesick initially that I came home my first weekend!)...</p>
<p>I still find it totally amazing that kids these days have access to such incredible information about schools & scholarships and loans and grants...it just didn't exist for me...but that's ok; I loved my time at UIUC ... it all turned out ok...</p>
<p>I only applied to three colleges. All were large universities, two in-state publics (one of which I applied to as a joke to see if I could get in main campus...I hated the school) and one oos public (of which I was a fourth generation legacy, so I considered it my safety). I thought I couldn't afford a private, so I didn't bother to even think about it. I had no clue where I could get in and had no guidance from counselors or my parents since they just went to their local uni due to a variety of reasons (beyond the scope of this thread). </p>
<p>Well I got into the two schools I thought I would, one in-state public and the oos public. I choose the in-state public (Pitt) because I fell in love with the Cathedral of Learning when I visited with my high school boyfriend's family my junior year. I knew next to little about the academics or anything like that, I just wanted to see the Cathedral everyday and be in a city.</p>
<p>The weird thing is that I wanted to go to school in a big city but 2 of the 3 schools I applied to were in the middle of nowhere! Good thing I got into Pitt! ;)</p>
<p>You'd think with this little guidance I either was in college a long time ago or came from a crappy high school. Nope, neither, I applied to colleges in 1999 and came from a top public high school in my area (our guidance counselors just didn't give a crap). Oh well, I enjoyed my time there and it gave me the opportunity to go to great schools I never had a chance at as an undergraduate as a graduate student.</p>
<p>In 1972, my "college counseling" consisted of the guidance couselor showing me a huge bookshelf chuck-full of college viewbooks, and him saying, "Well, look through them and see what appeals to you."</p>
<p>I browsed at random and decided to limit my search to in-state schools. Applied to a huge public, an Ivy, and a prestigious private. They were all completely different in profile - I think I chose them because they had attractive pictures in their viewbooks. Got into all of them - ruled out the Ivy (cost) and told my parents I would be happy at either of the other two and let them choose. Ended up at the private school, met my future husband there, and the rest is history.</p>
<p>Looking back, it seemed like such a haphazard process, but I guess it was "meant to be." No worries about a resume, or obsessing about test scores. I was just told to do my best in high school and enjoy my activities.</p>
<p>It is amazing how much information is available at one's fingertips today - and how tedious, agonizing, and worrisome the whole process has become.</p>
<p>I chose to go to a very conservative religious school because my parents made it clear that's the only one they would help pay for. It was 1969 and they were very afraid that if I went anywhere else I'd turn into a drug-addled hippie.</p>
<p>I'm a kid, but I can tell you that my mom's college choice was based on the fact that my grandparents liked the scenic drive out to the campus.</p>
<p>I only applied to one school, the state u nearest to home, because that's where my boyfriend was attending. We broke up at the end of my first semester.</p>
<p>When I was a HS senior (1970!) my mom casually asked "Have you applied to college yet?" Well of course I had not and the deadline for California state schools was a few days away. I sloppily dashed off my applications and checked the boxes for any Cal State or UC that was near the ocean. I got into them all and chose San Diego State, I can't even remember why. On move-in day we loaded a few cardboard boxes in my friends' old clunker and they drove me the 150 miles to SD. We had no clue where the campus was and had to pull over at the Visitor Information booth at Mission Bay for directions. </p>
<p>My husband picked San Diego State becuase it was the farthest state school from his parents. He also arrived sight unseen; his dad put him on a train with a duffel bag and the address of his old fraternity house. </p>
<p>I dont remember ever stresing about grades, SATs, or dorm accoutrements. Anyway, it all turned out fine, college was a blast, we both got degrees (husband eventually got a PhD at a UC.)</p>
<p>I passed on the two well known Cambridge schools because I was afraid my fiscally conservative parents would make me live at home and commute.</p>
<p>I only applied to one, Western Maryland (now McDaniel) because half my family had gone there "back in the day"--and it seemed nice enough to me, though I never went on a visit--just drove through a couple times.</p>
<p>My son's decision was probably stranger. He picked York College because he didn't have to take a foreign language there, and all the 35K+ LAC's we visited would have made him take 2 more years. (his defiance on the language issue saved us a TON of money!)</p>