Posts
As of today, most of you will have submitted applications to several schools. Hopefully acceptance letters are overflowing your mailbox with schools offering you a spot in their new freshman class of 2013. Making the choice between several acceptances will be one of the hardest decisions (and one of the most important) you will have to make. So my advice is to choose wisely. As you know from my article or from my initial posts, I chose the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana by the end of January 2006. It was the wrong choice, and I did not way my other acceptances heavily enough against it. I ended up transferring second semester of my freshman year to DePauw University, a small liberal arts school, in Greencastle, Indiana. DePauw was one of my initial choices, but I did not look at it closely enough. I blinded myself to all of the seemingly perfect things about the University of Illinois. All I could see was that it wasn't in Indiana, it wasn't where any of my friends were going, it was a school no one thought I would be accepted to, it was still a Big Ten, and it only took a little over two and a half hours in travel time. But these were the wrong things to base my decision off of. Travel time is indeed something important to consider, but not crucial. But accepting this school because of my pride, using it as a way to escape the people I went to school with for over ten years, making sure it was in a familiar athletic conference, and trying to escape Indiana, were not intelligent or rational reasons to base my acceptance upon. I wish I would have considered the following, and hope that you will take some of these suggestions to heart, so that you are much more confident in your college choice than I was.
1) Academics. I should have looked into classes, how they were run, who taught them (TA's versus Professors), the type of classroom atmosphere, and the students I wanted to surround myself with.
2) Campus Life. I should have stayed the night or weekend with someone in the dorms or in other University housing. I chose a privatized dorm at first and was isolated from the majority of students right off the bat when I first attended the U of I. Do not look at just the party scene. Although having fun is definitely the typical college cliché, in retrospect, it is of very little importance. Go and check out how the students interact. What they do during the week: volunteering, Union Board, student government, sorority/fraternity life, work-study, study places, and just going out to eat with friends.
3) In-state. I wish I would have appreciated where I went to high school and where I came from. Even attending a school across the Indiana-Illinois border, I ran into prejudices against Hoosiers. Remind yourself that home can be comforting, and knowing a few people at your school of choice is not the end of the world. You can choose who and who not to hang around with. Remember that being from Indiana and attending an Indiana school can be comforting as you surround yourself with people who know where you are coming from. Having common friends is a fun and uniting experience. Don't rule out staying in-state. I wish I would have swallowed my pride before stubbornly declaring I wanted to be an Illini.
