I don't know where this question came from in my head, but I was thinking about it yesterday for whatever reason. What I want to know is how you decided what college to attend?
There are many possibilities that are generally listed as reasons: location (as near or as far from where you currently live as possible), available programs, financial incentives, etc. So what helped you decide?
Me? I applied and was accepted to five universities. Two of them I applied to just for kicks to see if I could get in. The other three I was seriously considering for whatever reason.
In terms of a major, I had declared my intent on joining the architecture program at Iowa State University even though I wasn't sold on it. The idea of entering college undeclared didn't strike me as a viable option. I had always been led to believe that you needed that direction as immediately as possible. And, well, I liked the idea of designing buildings... having some near permanent legacy that could easily be shared with anyone you know. "Yeah, you see that building? I created it." Something like that.
Iowa State had a great architecture program. It was also far enough away from home that I could have some semblance of independence. And it was also in a strange new land called "Iowa" to which I had never visited... college is a great place to get a new lease on life and I was pretty fixated on leaving high school behind me. Not that I disliked my high school experience, but I just didn't want it to continue.
Of course, things change.
While I loved ISU and the campus and many of the friends I had out there, my roommates really soured my experience. In fact, there were very few Iowans that I became friends with... really only one. All the rest of the people I gravitated to and became friends with were from Illinois, Nebraska, and Minnesota. This was not planned. I did not pre-screen them. It just wound up that way. Maybe there was just this scent of desperation about us that made us find each other. And the one Iowan with which I was friends was one who did not want to be an Iowan; he harbored dreams of moving to Chicago when he graduated.
And there was the changing of my half-baked, hastily made decision to be an architecture major. I knew nothing about the program and what it entailed when I chose it my senior year of high school. To be honest, I had pretty much changed my mind before I even started at ISU. I had spoken with people who worked in architecture firms in the Chicago area to get a feel for what it was all about and decided it wasn't for me.
So I reapplied to and was accepted at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, IL. Even though it was much closer to home, I realized that college was whatever I wanted it to be. In my head, it could be as close or as far from home as I wanted, regardless of geographic distance. And I freakin' loved it in DeKalb. It was a fantastic place to go to school (no, they're not paying me to say that; but they can if they so desire). I was highly involved in different activities and kept myself very busy. I made some great friends and great professional relationships. It was, simply put, awesome. Despite changing my major yet again.
You?
Oh, and in postscript, kids, it's okay to be undeclared when you enter college. Don't make a rash decision.
Totally Unrelated Aside (TUA): Why do power outages seem to always happen when you least want them to? If the power is going to go off overnight, why do it on a night when you have work the next day and thus wind up sleeping poorly because you're worried about whether or not it will stay on when it finally returns and whether the battery backup in your alarm clock still has enough juice to wake you up in time, etc.? Why can't it just happen on, say, Saturday night when you don't give a damn about what time you wake up on Sunday? Or happen at some time when it's actually cool enough or there is enough of a breeze outside (sans rain) that the fact you no longer have power to your fan or air conditioner is not a big deal? That would just be too easy, wouldn't it? Stupid storms.
