Why did you pick your college?

tokyorevelation9
Fri, 03 Aug 2007 03:43:07 +0000

I chose Princeton because I was highly impressed with the biology facilities and the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. I got to meet some of the professors and I was pretty much sold. Also, my high school biology teacher, a '69 Princeton alum, helped me get to see what Princeton had to offer. Its study abroad opportunities and programs, especially those within the department, were vast compared to what I saw at other schools. A lot of the Ivy League schools have similar departments (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown), but only Princeton had the amount of offerings with a small department where you would get a lot of attention.

A lot of people say you shouldn’t choose a school based on a department, mainly because you might decide later that its not right for you. For me, making it through my introductory requirements to study abroad in Kenya is a very important goal now, and I am not giving it up anytime soon. My freshman year wasn’t easy, and I had a lot of trouble with university bureaucracy, but the courses have made that frustration dissipate rather quickly.

In a response to madjoy, I visited a lot of schools’ Hillel/ Jewish facilities as well, and that also had a big impact on my decision. I never made it to Brown’s Hillel, but I did visit Princeton’s CJL and Yale’s Hillel for Friday services, and I definitely had that homey feel you were talking about at Princeton. It is a good point to make, but I fear it can be hard to find sometimes when you are preoccupied, as many prospective students are.