A Fun Game For Current College Students and Alumni

SeniorSlacker · July 14, 2009, 12:27am

So I came up with this idea largely because of the utter boredom of my summer job combined with my history of CC wanderings. My boredom has often led me to reflect on my past year in college and also the time before I went off to college when I still in the process of making the big decision. Questions like “Am I happy with my experiences in the last year?”, "Is this what I had envisioned when I decided to attend?, and “How would I have done things differently knowing the things I know now?” often come up. It is mostly the last questions which my proposed hypothetical exercise addresses.

Basically, if people are willing to share, I would be interested to know,what undergraduate college people attended, where else they applied, which colleges they would apply to given their UG experiences and why. Just as a disclaimer, I am extremely happy at my current school, but I also think I could have just as amazing a year at another school. I have learned a lot this past year in terms of my own personal preferences and expectations vs. my actual environment.

I guess I will start off.

Current school: Whitman College

Other schools I applied to (and results):
American University (accepted)
Boston College (rejected)
Lewis & Clark College (accepted)
Occidental College (rejected)
Pitzer College (waitlisted)
San Diego State University (accepted)
Seattle University (accepted)
Tulane University (accepted)
UCLA (rejected)
UCSB (accepted)
UCSD (accepted)
USC (rejected)

Schools I would apply to if I could do it again:
Beloit College
George Washington University
Goucher College
Lewis & Clark College
Macalester College
Middlebury College
Seattle University
UCSB
UCLA
Whitman College

Thoughts:

I took off most of the of the bigger schools (UCSD, SDSU, USC) and replaced them with LACs/smaller universities mostly because I had thought that an LAC environment might be overly suffocating in combination with a secluded environment. This year, however, I found my fears to be completely unfounded: I realized that what I wanted out of a college education and the mission of liberal arts schools are almost exactly in line with each other. Additionally, campuses located in isolated areas are often some of the most vibrant campuses and also have some of the most gorgeous scenery.

Another factor was that I was itching to get out of my hometown, but was afraid that of being completely on my own in foreign place, so I applied to schools close to home. In retrospect, I never wanted to attend these schools and they were not good fits for me anyway.

On a related note, I did not feel very homesick at all, so my new list contains a more geographically diverse set of schools. While I had thought I couldn’t survive differences in region/population, I realized that there were so many schools I had looked over because of that which would have otherwise been excellent fits for me.

I applied to schools about which I was not serious about attending.

SeniorSlacker · July 14, 2009, 1:02am

So I posted a bit prematurely, and got timed out when I tried to edit my previous post.

Here is (are?) “Thoughts” (cont.):

In addition to my original field of interest (IR), a subject at which I had been relatively good at but had not really considered as a major/minor prospect (French) really became a priority to me. I added schools which could have facilitated this new development perhaps more smoothly than my current school.

Cost was (and still is) a huge factor, and I had been under the impression that only state schools would be affordable for my family and that attending an LAC would just be a dream unrealized. However, I am paying less now than I would have at my most inexpensive in-state option (even including financial aid). This seems counter-intuitive, but if given the chance, I would place less importance on affordability and more importance on the academic/social aspects that were important to me.

Also not something that I would have expected to come out of my mouth, but I feel like I underestimated myself a bit. I guess I didn’t really take the old CC adage “Build your college list from the bottom up” to heart, in that I had safeties, but not ones I really, truly were passionate about. I feel like I could’ve, but decided against, applying to schools I was really interested in that would have been considered reaches. While someone might point out “Hey you only got into 8 of your 13 college. That’s not a high percentage at all!”, I would imagine that applying to a few likely safeties that you absolutely would love to attend would be so much satifying than applying to a bunch of safeties you are lukewarm/less than lukewarm about. After all, you can only attend one school, so as I see it, if you only get into one school off your list of schools that you love, one is enough.

So I guess that’s it. Hopefully these thoughts will stop bouncing around in my head now that they’re written down.

The length of my post may suggest that I am more interested in musing about my own thoughts than hearing other people’s, but I can genuinely attest to the latter. Please feel free to share. :)

(Moderators: feel free to ignore my request)

jessiehl · July 14, 2009, 9:37am

Okay, I’ll bite:

Undergrad school: MIT, class of 2007

Other schools I applied to (and results):

Harvard (rejected)
Yale (rejected)
Princeton (rejected)
University of Chicago (accepted)
Vanderbilt (accepted)
Duke (accepted)
Johns Hopkins - Biomedical Engineering Program (accepted)
Rice (accepted)
NYU (accepted)

Schools I would apply to if I could do it again:

MIT
Caltech
Harvard
Yale
Princeton
U of Chicago
Johns Hopkins - Biomedical Engineering Program
Carnegie Mellon
Duke
Brandeis
Georgia Tech

Thoughts:

My list, as you can see, is not that different from what it was. The differences are because my academic interests shifted while I was in college, and also because the social environment matters more to me in retrospect. In high school, I had no real social life, and I assumed that I would continue to have no real social life in college, so the social environment of the school was close to irrelevant when I made my original list.

I picked all research universities then, and I would pick all research universities now. I am very pro-research-university (for myself - obviously others will care about different things and have different preferences). :)

Since my dad is a Georgia resident and my parents had joint custody, I might have been able to swing in-state status at Georgia Tech. And it’s a great school. I should have given it a lot more consideration at the time. I think I figured, semi-consciously, that if it was local to me, it couldn’t be that great.

I don’t know if I would have actually done it or not, but if I were doing it over, I would seriously consider doing ROTC. And I would have applied for lots of external scholarships. I very much undervalued financial independence when I originally applied.

A Fun Game For Current College Students and Alumni

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