<p>It would be great to hear from some students who have JUST chosen NU over other schools if you’re willing to share your decision process.</p>
<p>And a hearty WELCOME to all of you lucky future Wildcats!!</p>
<p>I just deposited. Reasons I chose over other schools:</p>
<p>-amazing atmosphere because of combo of D1 sports/first-class education
-very intellectual student body that will push me to be the best I can be
-Human Comm. Sci. major I’m in sounds exactly what I’m looking for
-premed is very good there w/high placement rates if I can survive
-Evanston is a great suburb outside one of the best cities in the US
-will be very difficult but will be very rewarding/great preparation</p>
<p><em>there are countless others, but these are the primary ones that come to mind</em></p>
<p>Congratulations on your choice! Northwestern’s Comm Sci major is very strong and can position you very strongly for a master’s in Communication Sciences & Disorders/SLP (top 5 in the field) if you decide medicine is not for you. Hopefully, your med school dreams will work out though! Welcome to Northwestern.</p>
<p>S sent me this article (North by Northwestern) which I find to be a very interesting read.</p>
<p>"Why I chose Northwestern</p>
<p>by Lisa Gartner
(April 29, 2008)</p>
<p>Is it really smart to let yourself fall in love with a snack? Of course it is! Especially when its Smartfood Brand. Were talking about the fresh-tasting, light-textured, air-popped popcorn adorned with the smooth, white cheddar cheese flavoring youve grown to love. You know you want it. You know where to get it. Now go out there and be Smart about it.</p>
<p>Thats what it says on the back of every individual-sized bag of Smartfood Popcorn White Cheddar. I know this because every time I spend .89 points on this particular bastardization of corn, I read the high-gloss description that runs alongside the nutrition facts.</p>
<p>For me, its a fascination with understanding what Ive bought into, understanding a decision Ive already made. But this is advertising, obviously, meant to persuade the average student strolling through the C-Store to make this popcorn their afternoon snack. They can only read the back and guess how it tastes, based on the promises the packaging makes.</p>
<p>This is what I want to say to the students accepted to the class of 2012: A bag of Smartfood Popcorn White Cheddar might illuminate the position that theyre in right now. Prospective students making their college decisions have gathered as much information as brochures, pamphlets, tours and even overnight stays will allow em. But the information that they are digesting is essentially propaganda. No one knows for sure whats inside their popcorn bag and what theyre really getting themselves into until theyve shipped their stuff to Evanston, Ill. And even then, its just beginning.</p>
<hr>
<p>A recent article on this site about Northwestern admission figures prompted a small comment war, which raged over the following quote by incoming freshman Adam Docksey:</p>
<pre><code>NU seemed cooler and more friendly than the uptight rep that the Ivies have. After the perpetual stress of high school, loading up on APs and freaking out whenever any test came along, Im looking forward to do something I want to do, not something that just satisfies the system. NU is so outside the box, I cant wait to live there, learn there, and grow there. I have a strong feeling that place is Mecca.
</code></pre>
<p>This kind of sentiment is the mortar that holds together the bricks of the Northwestern 2012 Facebook group. There are 182 threads, which range from Any Asians in the House?! to You on Youtube. My favorite, though, is, what specific things are you guys excited about??? started by Nicola Paracchini. Her personal list of excitements:</p>
<pre><code>-the actual college classes
-jogging along lake michigan
-going into chicago
-internships
-meeting people
-eating in evanston
-going out
-living on my own
</code></pre>
<p>My instinct is to make fun of this fresh-faced idealism. I know and you know that they absolutely dont know what the hell theyre talking about. Eating in Evanston? When your work-study can barely fund your last EV1 run? And being excited for internships? Sure, until you write 13 cover letters. You and I live the Northwestern experience that the pre-frosh try so earnestly to predict, so its laughable that wed look forward to actual college classes when were two clicks away from dropping Intro to Stats.</p>
<p>But I cant make fun of the Class of 2012, and I wont. Thing is, I was accepted to Northwestern on Dec. 10, 2005, under Early Decision. When I saw the word Congratulations on the computer screen, I screamed so loud that my brother thought I was being mugged.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, I still had six months of high school and three months of summer left. I had Odd Day lunch or was it Even Day? Im kind of startled that I cant remember with two of my best girl friends. The three of us would bemoan over sandwich crusts how we were so done with high school, how it was so unfair that we had to still be there. We developed our own catchphrase: Is it college yet?</p>
<p>College, to us, was something of Adam Dockseys Mecca. We would take classes that we would be passionate about no more Spanish IV or Personal Fitness. The boys would find a smart girl attractive, not intimidating, and we would transcend our high-school identities. We could be anyone: theater kids, intramural tennis enthusiasts, business-picketing political activists. And we would be, we assured each other: Wed be that and more.</p>
<p>But, looking back, I dont understand why Northwestern was my first choice or rather, I wonder how a 17-year-old kid in South Florida decided that a Midwest school shed never seen was the most perfect college for her to spend the next four years.</p>
<p>And Ive come to understand that I, myself, read the back of the popcorn bag.</p>
<p>Until I came to Northwestern, I couldnt actually experience Northwestern. Instead, I experienced a simulation of the school. You did this too: You read pamphlets and brochures that undergraduate admissions sent you. You clicked collegeboard.com, you scrolled College Confidential. Maybe you dragged a copy of the Fiske Guide to Colleges into the bathroom. You took a tour of campus, you went to a prospie weekend. And that was Northwestern to you.</p>
<p>I used all of those means to envision what would surely become my life at Northwestern. Id learn about politics, probably sink right into College Democrats, and Id start playing tennis again. I would take only classes that I was genuinely interested in (and never anything before noon!). From what Id gathered, The Daily Northwestern was the be-all, end-all of college journalism, so naturally Id join right away, climb the ranks, eventually take control, get a great job out of college, somehow make money in journalism, be rich and successful, and die happy and inexplicably married to Edward Norton. Fin.</p>
<p>Needless to say, my life at school resembles nothing of what I imagined back in 2005. Club Tennis is really competitive, and Im not that good. I experienced my first hangover the morning I was supposed to go door-to-door with the College Dems. And while I wrote two (kind of ****ty) articles for The Daily, and still believe its a fine paper, I realized that Im too narcissistic of a writer to know an inverted pyramid from a sugar cube.</p>
<p>Northwestern will not be what admitted students think it will be when they announce, Here I come! They will likely not take it by storm, and it will not take them by storm (unless as a snowstorm). The kids who miss snow, the kids who cant wait to take classes at the Medill School of World-Renowned Journalism, the kids who are so focused on picking a dorm thats crazy but not too crazy but still kind of crazy because its (woo!) freshmen year they will find themselves knee-deep in a pile of slush, too late to class to stop and admire the picturesque lake, cursing because their feet will now marinate in drenched socks for the 12 hours before they can return to their crazy but not too crazy but still kind of crazy dorm, because there are classes to go to and meetings that are absolutely pointless, and the classes that you were genuinely interested in require the most reading, so its going to be a long night, kid, a long night at the library you glimpsed on the campus tour, and you better get used to Smartfood Popcorn because tonights dinner is courtesy of the vending machine.</p>
<p>This sounds pessimistic at best. I know. But it is day-to-day life. There is an upshot, though, and here it is:</p>
<p>I ****ing love Northwestern. I love that I go here and that I chose to go here, and I would never go back and apply to any other school. And this is where it circles back to Facebook.</p>
<p>The class of 2012, like the class of 2011 before it, like the class of 2010 before it, has frenzied Facebook with questions such as: Where should I live next year? What are you most worried about? How would you describe the person above you? How would you stereotype the person above you?</p>
<p>At some point, each person in that group will preference her dorm and sign up for classes. Shell make the best guess she can. And at some point, these decisions she is lightheartedly typing into cyberspace will come alive. Allison Hall the idea became Allison Hall the place where I slept and did laundry and had shopping cart races and met my best friends. Social Inequality: Race, Class and Power became the class I swore Id take because I was genuinely interested in it and then it became the class I dropped. And yeah, stereotyping the person above you becomes stereotyping the real people you meet.</p>
<p>What I want to say to pre-frosh is to stop worrying about the perfect Northwestern experience. Guys, you cant create it until you get here and create it; and honestly, there is no single Northwestern experience. Its different for every person, truly. The thing that unites us all is that we each saw something here that made us see ourselves here.</p>
<p>College is not a mecca, and usually not a place of transcendent transformation. But it doesnt need to be. Whatever dorm you end up in, youll be fine. Maybe it will smell, maybe it wont. I can tell you that Bobb is not a zoo, as the discussion threads have insinuated, though the rumors are true in so far as that the furniture is chained to the walls. Youll probably change your major 12 times, no matter how sure you are about your future. Youll probably sleep through the class you had to lie, beg and steal to get into, and you will ****ing hate snow by February.</p>
<p>But you will discover the intangible joys that could never be captured by a rankings list. You will discover how to run wildly, half-buzzed and laughing like a little kid, to catch shuttles at night. You will discover amazing individuals who get your crazy sense of humor, dont care that youre messier than Middle East politics, and like you for the pasted-together collage of a person that youre slowly becoming. You will discover yourself in the middle of one of those outside-the-classroom philosophical discussions that you never thought really happened or, while splitting a bottle of wine with a close friend, debating what it means to be in love. And you will discover snow when the first flurries fall like polite confetti over the dark surf of Lake Michigan.</p>
<p>You will fall in love with Northwestern. It will not be the Northwestern that you envisioned, and it will not be what the packaging on the proverbial popcorn bag said it would be, but you will love her all the more for it. And maybe, like me, you will wonder how you made the best guess of your life"</p>
<p>" I ****ing love Northwestern. I love that I go here and that I chose to go here, and I would never go back and apply to any other school. </p>
<p>snip…</p>
<p>But you will discover the intangible joys that could never be captured by a rankings list. You will discover how to run wildly, half-buzzed and laughing like a little kid, to catch shuttles at night. You will discover amazing individuals who get your crazy sense of humor, don’t care that you’re messier than Middle East politics, and like you for the pasted-together collage of a person that you’re slowly becoming. You will discover yourself in the middle of one of those outside-the-classroom philosophical discussions that you never thought really happened or, while splitting a bottle of wine with a close friend, debating what it means to be in love. And you will discover snow when the first flurries fall like polite confetti over the dark surf of Lake Michigan.</p>
<p>You will fall in love with Northwestern. It will not be the Northwestern that you envisioned, and it will not be what the packaging on the proverbial popcorn bag said it would be, but you will love her all the more for it. And maybe, like me, you will wonder how you made the best guess of your life" </p>
<hr>
<p>Thanks for sharing this. Guess some things haven’t changed since 2008, as it perfectly captures so much of what D has said about her 2011 freshman experience!</p>
<p>NorthwesternDad…thanks for posting that. We just got back from Monday’s Wildcat Day…S is now leaning towards Northwestern over WashU/St L…but, it’s a very, very difficult decision…we live in a cold environment, so when we read about the snow…well, on the one hand, we know it well…on the other hand, ugh! That being said, the campus looked much prettier than we remembered it from our Wildcat Day visit in '07 (older son chose WashU by a nose and loved it there)…but, the next week or so is going to be a lot of very cool discussions about both schools!</p>
<p>Most welcome - MomCares, mtldad.</p>
<p>mtldad - good luck on whatever choice your S makes…can’t really go wrong with either.</p>
<p>I just had an experience that made me think of this thread. </p>
<p>Yesterday I noticed a gentleman wearing an NU sweatshirt leaving a store and asked him if he had attended NU. It turned out that he did, and also has a D who is an NU senior. As we spoke, it came out that he had recently been hearing about our D – he knew her name without my mentioning it and was aware of many of her recent accomplishments through the Northwestern alumni network – and as it turns out he is a very prominent figure in our city.</p>
<p>This brief encounter really illustrated to me what a powerful ally the NU mafia can be. Wow!</p>
<p>More power to NU Mafia!</p>
<p>We’re currently living one downside of choosing Northwestern. Students love it there so much that many of them seem to find great projects that keep them in Evanston (and too far from mom) during the summer. ;-)</p>
<p>I love Northwestern and Evanston/Chicago, but this humidity is making me miss sunny San Diego/La Jolla dearly!</p>
<p>D felt the heat yesterday, too! Glad there’s at least that to make her miss home! ;-)</p>
<p>I can understand people’s enthusiasm for NU here on this thread. But are there any negative aspects at all? Say the weather in winter. My S is seriously considering NU along with UChicago. But from New Jersey, I am a little bit concerned about the harsh winter there.</p>
<p>@hzhao2004 - We’re from the mild west coast and our D didn’t mind the winter this year at all – in fact she enjoyed being around snow – and she lived right smack on the lake! But I did hear that this winter was mild.</p>
<p>That said, weather was not a consideration at all in D’s school choice (every school she applied to was in a colder place than where we live), so she may not be typical in that respect.</p>
<p>For us so far the only negatives are that D is having so much fun at NU that she won’t be home until early August, and that they don’t give much in merit scholarship $$. ;-D</p>
<p>Weather is certainly not a deciding factor, but it might be a tie breaker, say, with UPenn or Georgetown.</p>
<p>Sent from my Desire HD using CC</p>
<p>As far as weather, I’d rather have a real snow than what you might get in Philly or DC which is an icy, slippery snow and the city does not handle it well. But weather is really insignificant for the most part IMHO. One of my daughter’s favorite days was 2 years ago when the school closed due to the weather, which it has only done two times before. </p>
<p>There are negatives to NU as there are to all schools. At NU a lot depends on your major. They are certainly not, as a whole, warm and fuzzy like a small LAC might be. Students need to handle more on their own, working through the red tape and bureaucracy that most larger universities have. Most kids figure out the system by the middle of their first term Freshman year.</p>
<p>Not everyone likes the trimester vs semester schedule, some prefer it, so that’s personal opinion.</p>
<p>Without knowing your son’s areas of interest it’s hard to discuss negatives because each school has its’ own quirks.</p>
<p>Oh, and NU gives no merit aid, it’s all based on need. If you can afford NU, why not just apply and see what happens. For my daughter (soon to be Senior) the negatives are small vs the positives.</p>
<p>Someone from New Jersey is worried about weather? In my best Jon Stewart doing a Jersey Guy Accent: " Nah - youse got nothing to worry about." Jeeezs it’s like the same freakin weather!! Cold in the winter, warm in the summer."</p>
<p>But we got deep dish pizza.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Another negative aspect is that of those who are enthusiastic about NU, only 15% are lucky enough to be admitted. With a second child about to apply to colleges, we’re keenly aware of this negative. ;-D</p>
<p>nugraddad, spot on! As I implied, weather will be the slightest factor to me. I will be ecstatic if my S gets into NU.</p>
<p>Sent from my Desire HD using CC</p>
<p>It’s the same weather. It’s a non issue. Frankly, my daughter in Boston has had far worse weather than her twin brother at NU, and no one seems to worry about Boston being “too cold.” 2 years ago, it was Philly that I was snowed into /stranded for 4 days. I don’t know where this myth comes from, but it’s really no different from the Northeast.</p>