<p>I’m a geeky liberal Hispanic that wants to study materials engineering, and I applied to Auburn (a VERY southern SEC school) as my safety. They ended up throwing money at me like it was going out of style…all in all my parents will have to pay AT MOST 8k/year for tuition, room and board, everything. In addition I get $4k to go study overseas, a free laptop freshmen year, and admission to the honors college. I could save a lot of money to go to grad school at Stanford or MIT, heck, maybe even a new car freshman year. It looks like I will end up going there, mostly for financial reasons (my parents work at Kraft, and the company is doing so badly right now that my parents are scared they will lose their jobs). Thing is, I don’t know if I will fit in. It’s like an hour away from Montgomery (yes, THAT Mongomery). The school is 90% white, and when I visited I got the impression that people of different races didn’t hang out together (black kids only hanging out with black kids, the asian kids hanging out together, etc).</p>
<p>Has anyone had a similar experience, ending up at a safety school that maybe wasn’t the best fit because of cost/distance/etc? Did you end up liking it? My parents tell me that the school has a lot of international students, especially in engineering, but I’m still concerned…I mean I live in Tennessee and I had the Obama sticker torn off my car twice, how bad would it be in freaking ALABAMA?</p>