Northwestern questions

EmmyBet
Wed, 24 Oct 2012 10:28:25 +0000

I also want to agree with those who do NOT think Providence is “the middle of nowhere.” It is a terrific little city (I have lots of family connections there) and has a wonderful theatre scene. It is not Chicago (where I lived for many years), but it is not the opposite, by any means.

And to address the OP’s latest question: Personally, I have lots of secondary connections to both Brown and NU. First, I went to the University of Chicago and never once would have considered NU. It’s a wonderful school, but the Big 10, pre-professional, vibe was NOT for me. My second choice after U of C was Brown.

My two Ds strongly considered NU. D1 was a top stat kid, and for her the NU vibe appealed more than U of C, but it was a tiny bit too big and too rah-rah for her. She also planned to apply to Brown, although she wasn’t completely enthralled with the lack of structure - I guess for her, like you D, while Brown and NU were each on different sides of center for her, they both appealed. But for her, all was moot, since she applied and was accepted to Tufts ED.

D2 had lower stats, but good enough to try for NU as a reach, mostly because of its location and reputation of the theatre program. She visited after she applied, and realized it wasn’t a good fit for her - I would say she’s more like a Brown type, although not completely bohemian, which Brown really isn’t. She had enough schools so didn’t apply to Brown - instead she applied to Vassar, Brandeis and Bard, among others (but not Sarah Lawrence or Hampshire, both of which she considered too far on the “bohemian” spectrum for her taste). She was rejected by NU, which ended up being no real disappointment for her (from another thread you can see that she probably didn’t have the theatre resume they were looking for, either), and by Vassar, which stung more, but she was accepted by her other BA schools.

It took her all year to manage the decisions she needed to make about her BFA journey, and also to decided what kind of school appealed to her the most - including the final BFA/BA decision. There were some surprising twists and turns as she explored where she stood on the "rah-rah’ — bohemian spectrum; the results were hard to find and ultimately she took a chance. She ended up in a BFA, in an artsy/Great Books honors college program within a very conventional and not highly prestigious university, outside of NYC - a factor which was VERY important to her. She also got a huge merit scholarship, which changes her long-term game plan in many positive ways.

Your D is of course a wholly different person, but I wanted to paint this picture of how someone might think about these things and where it might lead.