<p>Hi Boatfoot,</p>
<p>Thanks for the detailed response on why your D chose Auburn. Being debt free is certainly a great reason for choosing a school and it sounds like your D has some great qualities that will take her far. Congratulations to her for getting such great merit scholarships!</p>
<p>Did your D get accepted into some of the other colleges you mentioned like Princeton, Stanford, etc? Are you from the south? I always like to get the whole picture of a student and their choices.</p>
<p>UTD is on the top of my son’s safety schools (great chess program, great merit aid, great church in the area, strong in the sciences) but I think Auburn would be a very good safety school, as well, for all the reasons you mentioned. </p>
<p>We are not Methodist but I am guessing (thinking? hoping) that Auburn has a lot of variety in the Christian community and that my son would find a fit. We are part of a body of churches, Sovereign Grace Ministries, that would be considered essentially reformed with a more contemporary worship style. I don’t know anything about the south but I do know that a friend of ours who used to be a part of our church teaches at a private Christian univ. in Georgia and has really enjoyed life in the south. (And he’s from Canada!)</p>
<p>As far as the small town feel, I don’t know what my son would think without visiting. We are in a large city and he is used to that. It’s not like NYC but more suburban feeling within a large city. He really likes Pittsburgh and Philly and NY was too much. He didn’t say whether he thought Princeton seemed too small, so I think he could be happy in a smaller town; hard to say, though. My son is enamoured of Nashville because of the music scene but he’s never been.</p>
<p>I wish we had the money for him to visit more schools but he’ll likely apply to most sight unseen. We will visit Harvey Mudd and possibly some other schools in California and perhaps he’ll buy himself a ticket to visit Nashville this summer. That’s why I value these lists so I can get as much info as possible about schools and share that with my son.</p>