Where did you go to COLLEGE??

Virginia Tech. Loved it.

What did you major in? *Sorry I'm so nosy.

NC State. Flunked out!

I majored in sleep science.

According to my DAD, I've been going to the School of Hard Knocks all my life.

Studio Art.

I'm also a born and raised NCSU Wolfpack fan.

I studied fried chicken at the school of hard knocks!

Vassar College loved it a lot!

texas a&m
university of kentucky
now rice university

Georgia Tech; because I'm decent at math & couldn't think of anywhere else to go; yeah it's pretty cool so far; yeah if you like geeks.

i bet im the only aggie on ilx!

Hobart and William Smith Colleges for two years then transfered to NYU. Both were ok. Academically I prefered HWS but for nearly everything else I prefered NYU.

Um, preferred. Obv neither taught me how to spell.

Mississippi State. Four wasted years, one wasted degree.

carnegie mellon, nearly three full years, majored in classical voice/music theater. turned on, tuned in, dropped out...

nyu - enjoyed it ok, maybe a bit too much if you know what i'm saying

RMIT, for a 2 year diploma in professional writing and editing. I loved it to bits and would pay to do it again. It wasn't really like uni though, it was a specific dedicated course.

better 4 years wasted than 4 wasted years, amirite

University of Queensland (wanky) and University of Southern Cross (ghetto).

(well, wanky for an aus uni).

One year at St. Mary's College in Southbend, Indiana (sister school of Notre Dame) - beautiful campuses, but I hated the experience and transferred out.

Transferred to St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. Liked the academics. It's a dry campus, though, and kind of monocultural. I liked a lot of things about it, but if I had to go back and do it over again, I probably would have made a different choice.

Currently BACK in college at College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, MN, doing the post-baccalaureate nursing program. I really like the profs and the other students, but the administration leaves a lot to be desired. Also, it is kind of a dead seeming campus during evenings (possibly because it is a women's college... possibly a lot of the students are having fun at one of the other campuses in St. Paul).

Carleton College, U of MN

I plan on staying here, at the University of Missouri (next year). :/

I hope I don't have to go to college, but it seems pretty imminent.

Most people plan on leaving town. The one bright side to all of this; I'm going to make lots of $$$ from all these college essay requests. Capitalism, yes?

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http://www.disp.duke.edu/images/shield.gif http://img.search.com/thumb/1/1d/Mcgill-logo.png/125px-Mcgill-logo.png

http://www.sportslogos.net/images/College/NCAAn-r/Rutg_2596.gif

When I was there it was kind of a depressing place for everyone. Now it's an exciting place for assholes who only care about football.

The nice part of it looks like this:

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/0/0d/Old_Queens_Rutgers.jpg

But much more of it looks like this:
http://www.gradprofiles.com/images/rutgers-food-science-pic.jpg

(the food science building!)

In my second year at DePaul University. For the most part, I dig it. There's that whole "monocultural" thing going on here, as well, despite the school constantly playing up how diverse it is (then again, it seems most universities/colleges think having four percent of each minority is "very diverse"). Met some good people, taken some good classes. Looking forward to the rest of my stay.

mizzou for sure tape store?

I went to Michigan Technological University. I shouldn't have gone there at all, much less right out of high school in the town I grew up in. I had no idea what I wanted to do, shouldn't have stayed in that town, etc. My undergrad career was a long, abortive, fucked up mess. Being stuck at an heavily male, isolated, engineering school was a bad thing all around.

Oh well. It's too late now, but sadly it's still probably the biggest regret in my life.

some places in canada

General Motors Institute, right after they let women and minorities in. Purdue for awhile. Arizona State for a little bit. And Washington State for a smidge.

taste Studies @ Kfc . edu

University of Sheffield and Politecnico di Torino; I'm just about to start at LSE but only by distance.

Don't let Hurting 2 fool you; Ru+g3rs is amazing (Eisbar also went there), and the Food Science Building is, like, nothing more than a bus stop (5 campuses spread over 2 towns = an entire dedicated 8-route bus system). It's got some 35,000 students and there's allllways something going on, and some of the buildings look reaaaaally pretty (and then other buildings are on Livingston).

This is the only photo of my campus i could find: http://www.scu.edu.au/students/prospective/gfx/locations/Tweed762.jpg

v small, sorry. If you can't really tell, it's just some try-hardish, ugly, "modern" thing.
The uni offers a business/surfing degree. I remember hearing the whole course is getting audited. This doesn't surprise me, coz all I remember of those guys is them fucking about in the library and then going to the beach. The main teacher guy (I don't think he was a prof or nuthin) was the biggest moron I've ever seen.

Psychology / RUG (Belgium). Dropped out cause I wasn't Florence N nor disciplined enough to study.

Psychology&Romance Cultures And Languages/French @ RUG (Netherlands).

Edinburgh University, St. Andrews University and Strathclyde University

Undergrad at Oxford, started PhD at Macquarie (Sydney) and am now finishing it back at Oxford.

I R MORON, U GUYZ OH SO CLEVAH.

So Aja, where are YOU going?

Sarah Lawrence College.

UWA - failed arts degree - fucking detested the place
Curtin, BSc (hons) - loved it
UWA again - LLB (hons) fucking loved it

University of Sussex and Georgetown.

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/communications/corporate/guidelines/identity/downloads/img/crestcol.gif

University of Warwick, Italian with Film Studies

Williams. There's a spot that looks ridiculously like the first picture Hurting posted, I only realized it was different the third time I looked when I realized the building off to the right didn't belong there. But yeah, I liked it a lot.

Italian? Sounds like cheating to me...

This from the guy that did American studies and now pretends it was a history degree.

I am actually thinking of possibly majoring in Philosophy of Linguistics at MIT, but MIT is so hard to get into...

welcome to GA Tech

I don't want to live in Georgia!!

zing

Minorin' in Philosophy/Majorin' in Zing

(not really, though)

Went to Kent State. Majored in computer science. Fucking HATED it. Now for some reason I'm going back to get my master's and then my doctorate. I am an idiot. The end.

If money wasn't an object I'd love to go back and study. I love that structure.

UNCG

Do you know what that means?

Undergrad: UC Berkeley (double major in Philosophy and English)
Yet more Undergrad: Brasenose College, Oxford University (got a second B.A. in English)
Grad School: UC Berkeley (decided I needed to spend another eleven years getting a PhD)

As a lifelong addict of educational institutions, I do sometimes fantasize about getting another PhD in a different discipline. I'm like one of those weird old ladies that can't stop adopting cats or something.

i went here:

http://www.usyd.edu.au/images/content/cws/about/profile/history/Quad-550.JPG

lets just say i managed to graduate and leave it at that.

hey dudes.

there was an article in people magazine last year where they fagen actually goes back to annandale with the interviewer. i read it at the doctor's office and was shocked and appalled.

getting a second b.a. (like drew daniel did): classic or dud? i dunno if i could go through that all over again! by senior year all the freshmen seemed REALLY young.

hey dudes.

there was an article in people magazine last year where they fagen actually goes back to annandale with the interviewer. i read it at the doctor's office and was shocked and appalled.

-- bell_labs, Friday, September 14, 2007 3:46 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

he's been back fairly often supposedly. anyway, post link to article?

You know, the thing upthread about picking a school with the right atmosphere is really important, and not just for the reason it appears to be. Lots of schools offer similar opportunities to students -- the thing is that some have atmospheres that will guide you to take enthusiastic advantage of those opportunities, and others have an atmosphere that will drive to sit cynically in your apartment avoiding them. I don't know how exactly you can tell this when you're 17, but I suspect it has a lot to do with being a good judge of your own character.

I went to Northwestern for undergrad, which was generally great. But at that time it felt somewhat large and socially apathetic, and for a while I tended to just hang out quietly with the people I liked -- it wasn't until my last year and a half, once I'd applied into a specialized major, that I felt very engaged or excited with my studies. I'm happy with how everything worked out -- I think I picked up valuable stuff even in my hanging-out-quietly phase -- but I have to admit that I went off to college a lot more energetic than I left it, and picked up some slackery habits during the first few years that I'm still shaking off.

(Northwestern seems very different now, and I don't blame it anyway: for people who were motivated and engaged and non-cynical when they got there, it was opportunities galore. And maybe I'd have been more engaged and opportunity-seizing at a different school, but I might also have missed out on the valuable stuff I got on the side.)

I'm now just finishing an MFA at Columbia. I would recommend the program and instruction, but now they're raising tuition and not funding people, which makes it a pretty unappealing choice.

A lot of my vitriol towards Carleton is the fact that it went from 100% need-blind admission (which is why I was able to go) to 0% need-blind at this point. It should be noted that tuition went up $20000 per year in this time span.

Allow me to correct myself. Comprehensive fee (That's tuition and room and board) when I went was ~$18000. Current comprehensive fee ~$45500.

Dicks. You may have 0 of my dollars, so stop calling.

Hey, Spencer!

I finally went with a major in English and a minor in uh, Education! Heh! The minor program was alright but I feel I could've gotten along fine without it.

I was discouraged from pursuing the sciences because of the vicious "weeding" courses. Although I did have some illuminating encounters with brilliant professors (who were actually not Berkeley's most famous intellectuals), my overall experiences is poisoned by that bitch errrr...I meant the chair of the department, the huge faceless lecture courses, and the TA crisis. As mentioned, due to budget cuts some of my large courses had to do without TAs, who are the ones who really do the teaching. TAs were also on strike or on walkouts, and I didn't blame them. My TAs were nice, bright folks, but they were too burdened and inexperienced to even compare to the professors who taught the humble elementary courses at CSU.

I did take science courses at both UC and a CC, and I stand by my pronouncement that the quality of instruction and opportunity for learning at a CC was far superior to that of Cal's. We were actually learning science at the CC instead of just trying to trample on others who might fuck up the curve. At CC, they still graded on a curve, and in the more advanced courses it was a tough curve because we competed against people who were entering medical and dental schools. There was an element of competition with the curve, but also wisely built into the course was a grade that required successful collaboration with presentations and experiments because that is how it would be in the real world.

I haven't taken any literature courses from CC, although I have taught literature at CCs. The intellectual level is generally lower at a CC, but that doesn't mean students and instructors do not engage in sophisticated analysis. At the CSU I attended, I would say that actually the discourse is very sophisticated and on par with Cal's without the "I fart higher than my arse" attitude. At a UC I took a graduate seminar with Sue-me 3ll3n C4ase, who is a huge name in lesbian-feminist discourse, and she was the worst instructor of my entire career. I am not impressed with famous intellectuals. It's not simply a personality clash between me and her; she was uniformly disliked by all except one (her pet) in the seminar.

As for Aja, I think you should definitely leave SF. Going to college away from home is a great opportunity and convenient excuse to explore another place. Grab it because you never know when you get to choose the place where you want to live.

http://www.thaibikeworld.com/images/updatednews/usa/018.jpg

Bristol University, 1989-92 BSc Joint Hons in Biology and Geography

I lived here:

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/conferences/images/badock4.jpg

and I graduated in this building

http://img.search.com/thumb/4/4f/Wills_Memorial_Building_from_road_during_day.jpg/250px-Wills_Memorial_Building_from_road_during_day.jpg

i know what uncg means

xpost

I did a second B.A. because I got a Marshall scholarship and knew that I intended to got to grad school back in the USA afterwards; because I had pursued a double major in my first undergrad degree, I felt a little bit weak in some of the areas that I knew would be covered far more intensively for the Oxford B.A. (i.e. Middle English and medieval lit) than in the American undergraduate system. I thought that spending two years reading and writing widely across many historical fields would be better prep for a PhD in English than doing a two year Masters and then starting the whole process over again stateside.

To Melinda re: undergrad at Cal . . . I found that Cal got better and better. My first year I was unhappy with the size of the classes, but things really improved in the home stretch as I got out of the basic requirements and into the seminars. That said, I think my experience with the philosophy department as an undergrad was both more welcoming and more intense/stimulating in comparison with English undergrad because it was a smaller department and had smaller classes across the board. Going to the same place for undergrad and grad school is a little disorienting, you do have a strong "travelling without moving" sensation.

hstencil: That article was in EW actually. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1174152,00.html.

I know a little about DC schools. I interned in the GW library. It is currently the most expensive school in the US I think. The students seemed pretty savvy and motivated. G'town has a very nice campus: it's probably the most traditional of the DCers. I think I applied there and didn't get in so obv. they can make mistakes:) I haven't been to American but I've heard good things about it. All of these schools will offer great opportunities if you are interested in politics, foreign relations, policy, etc. If you are interested in things that more normal students are interested in, you might have to struggle a bit to find your nitch. Other schools to consider: Catholic is very pretty and has a smaller student body, but it probably not worth the money if you are paying full price; George Mason is not in DC but in Northern Virginia, but it is probably the best value. Of course if you are paying out-of-state fees the value may be negligible. GMU is a large state university that has been chasing name professors and basically increasing their prestige over the years. One negative is that the campus isn't all that picturesque. Another thing you might want to consider Univ. of Maryland: very near DC and also has a tradtional campus, and it won't skew so heavily toward policy but will have oppurtunities in anything you want to pursue. So will the other schools, except for many of the students there will be there bc they are attracted to the machinery of DC, I think. Good luck!

<em>so the real question--if you went to an expensive, highly touted school, do you:

a) think you got a better education than you would have at a lower-usnews-ranked school?
b) if so, do you think it was twice as good as a school half as expensive?
c) has yr school's name/rep given you otherwise unavailable opportunities?

in my case, a) probably, b) very doubtful, c) no, mainly because i'm a slack motherfucker

-- mookieproof, Thursday, September 13, 2007 11:37 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link</em>

COSIGN

fuck u, nu-ILX

http://www.pvc.maricopa.edu/puma/oct05/images/Tulane1.jpg

tulane in one of its soggier moments

xpost: oh, dear. one of my best friends really wanted to transfer to tulane a few months before katrina...perhaps lucky for her that it didn't work out.

to a: given my high school friends' experiences, a few spots lower ranking makes no difference, but waaaaaay lower ranked schools don't sound as good educationally; also, friends who went to large state schools had a very different <i>kind</i> of education, and are better educated than i am in some ways, worse in others.

to b: haha, no.

c: yes, one, but it seems like the otherwise-unavailable opportunities are only good for the first year after college, then you're on your own.

I went to Tulane, too...(sigh)...

southern arkansas university, home of the muleriders.
went cuz they gave me a spot on the tennis team and scholarship money for my only slightly above average act score.

one cool thing about the school is (or at least was) its above average international student population. met some rad people from all over. many of them told me the same thing when i asked how, of all the schools they could've picked, they chose sau. they had a big book of u.s. universities. they ran their finger down the tuition column and picked the cheap one.

Aja - My roommate is a linguistics major at BU and claims the linguistics department at MIT (she's worked there as a research assistant) is really intense. Everyone I know from Emerson (most of them transferred there from BU) really like(d) it, but they were all marketing/english-y types. The kids there seem a little more "art school" types--kind of a nice midway between the "normal"/preppy kids at BU and the totally weird kids at Berklee.

UNCG

Do you know what that means?

-- Jesse, Friday, 14 September 2007 03:04 (13 hours ago)

UNC GREENSBORO!!! I know probably thirty people there lol.

and finally:

a) A lot of those "rankings" are pay-to-be-listed, so I don't put a lot of stock in them. At the same time, I'm pretty sure I got a better education than at a school with lower admissions standards (but at the SAME TIME AS THAT, my school has a program specifically for kids who are a little dumber and a lot richer than the rest of us).

b) Yes and no. I probably would have gotten just as decent an education in the general lib arts stuff at Chapel Hill, but they didn't have my major. Also, I got no financial aid whatsoever from Chapel Hill, so in the end BU was actually the cheaper school. I don't really feel I've been cheated out of my money.

c) No idea.

Being for the benefit of Aja, who asked:

I would recommend The Evergreen State College to any student who knows what they want to learn, is very motivated to learn it, and wants to direct their own education. For such students, TESC is pure gold, since they know how to get out such a student's way and to encourage rather than hinder them. If you are liable to just drift in the absence of a well-defined structure, then a more traditional declare-a-major-and-take-the-required-courses approach is probably better for you.

My major problem with Carleton was that I didn't fit in well with their campus culture. Strike that. I didn't fit in at all.

They were very Midwest and middle class and middling students - not bad people, really, but possessing a sort of splendid mediocrity that at first depressed me, then drove me half mad with misery. No one seemed to have a single original thought, nor were they interested in ever having one, if by some magic they were enabled to. It was stultifying and ultimately horrific - for who I was.

Also it's very good for the student with absent-minded hygiene.

I kid, I kid. It seems like a nice school with fairly strange (in a good way) alums.

I'm a freshman at UNC-Chapel Hill right now, majoring in god only knows what. it seems pleasant enough. kinda weird tho since I was raised an NC State fan.

man i thought all you guys were still in high school

thanks for the link, bill! great article.

But just outside of Adolph's, he sees it. The house. ''Right there is the house that I was busted in,'' he says, gesturing toward a two-story structure nearby. Here, finally, lies the story behind ''My Old School.'' It was around 5 a.m., a Thursday in May 1969, when a swarm of sheriff's deputies descended on Bard, sweeping through dorms and off-campus residences, including this small house, where Fagen lived with a roommate. ''They went up and down the halls, knocking on doors,'' says Boylan, who was in his room at Ward Manor at the time. ''Toilets were flushing everywhere to get rid of any pot that you had. I threw mine out the window. All you had to do was say to the cop, 'What are you doing?' They'd say, 'That's it, resisting arrest.' Somebody would say, 'What the hell is going on?' 'Oh, profanity! Arrest him.''' Fagen, Becker, and Fagen's girlfriend, Dorothy White, were all dragged off to jail.

''These were the days when there was a 'war on longhairs,' as they used to call it,'' says Fagen, ''and Bard's in this kind of rural district. They picked up about 50 kids just at random. There were a few warrants, and one was for me, which was based totally on false testimony. They handcuffed our hands behind our backs and put us in a paddy wagon and took us off to the Dutchess County Jail. They took all of the boys, about 35 of us, most with really long hair, and shaved our heads. I remember some of them were crying. I don't think any of them had seen their head for three or four years. It didn't make that much difference to me. But it was scary, you know? To hear the cell-block door slam shut, the whole business with the handcuffs and the paddy wagon. I'd never been arrested or put in jail before.''

what it doesn't mention is that this drug raid was most famously led by then dutchess county ada, mr. g. gordon liddy.

Hmm...I'm realizing that the schools I want to get into are some of the harder ones to get into...I need some safety schools, but I have I don't know which ones would be good...

What are some good schools that aren't impossible to get into?

Dang it....I need to think fully before typing...I keep typing half sentences and then changing my mind on what I want to say and forget to delete the part of the sentence I wanted to change...

Dangit!

The University of Missouri-Columbia.

Oh, wait..."Good"? NEVER MIND.

Haha..yeah, I know...

I'm gonna need one kick ass personal statement, aren't I??

I'm so screwed...

What are you looking for in a school? If you can narrow that down, by location, size, specialty, then you can come up with a list of reach schools, possible schools, and safety schools. If you can do this, it might also save you a lot of time and headaches in applying. I think the book "Colleges that Change Lives" includes lesser known schools that are not impossible to get into in.

Hmm...I hate getting more books about college...just got one today, but that one sounds like something more useful to me.

I definately want a school on the East Coast...preferably DC, or Boston area. Size, I'm not too too picky about that. I would like a smaller school, but wouldn't be heart-broken at a big school. Speciality, I need to think more on...Three differnt jobs I would like to have are translator (for the UN if the world was perfect or I study super super hard), a pathologist, or even a graphic designer...These three things have absolutely nothing in common!!!!! This is probably the biggest reason why I can't decide on a school...

http://letsturnthisfuckingwebsiteyellow.com/yellowcounter.php

Don't worry too much about what you want to study. Most schools will offer at least a sound liberal arts training, and then you can specialize in gradute school. It might be a good idea to have a feel for what type of students you would like to be around, for example heavily engineering/science based versus liberal arts based. Of the things you mentioned, any school will let you study foreign languages, for some of the more obscure languages though, you might have to research which schools have offerings. Pathology? I have no idea . . . I guess you could do what pre med school students do and fulfill the premed requirements while majoring in whatever you want (or whatever you feel will make your med school app attractive). Graphic designer? For something like that, you might want to go to a more artsy school. Or a large university. I'm not sure how much graphic design a small liberal arts college would offer, though I have no idea really. For that you might want to get your BFA from an art school or a large state school. What you might want to decide first is if you want to go to a small liberal arts college or a larger university.

This page (though it is slanted to the former) discusses some of the distinctions.

http://www.ctcl.com/why/myths.htm

http://www.flickr.com/photos/numerosiete/sets/1403349/

as other people are saying, it's way too early for you to decide what you want to do with your life. many if not most people leave college with a very different idea of what to do than before they went in, and there are people who are twice your age who haven't answered that question. however, given that you're interested in lots of different things, you might want to choose a university over a liberal arts college because it will afford a greater breadth and depth of offerings. i was initially pretty attracted to the small college thing, but when i actually visited one or two of them they reminded me unfavorably of high school in their size, and i was ready to go to college, not back to high school, and it wasn't long before i was swayed to the notion that the best undergrad experience is at an undergrad-centric research university - find the universities that have the smallest undergrad classes and/or that are known for their focus on teaching and you've found maybe the best places to go to school. which isn't to denigrate small colleges completely - there are certainly some very good and great ones, and some people may be better-suited to them, and the choice might be tougher up against a very large university - but if your possibilties are boundless, why potentially limit yourself? of course, you can apply to a mix of colleges and universities and decide once you actually get in or not.

is there a reason you've left NYC off the list? or the midwest?

http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b361/tapestore/wear.gif

it's way too early for you to decide what you want to do with your life. many if not most people leave college with a very different idea of what to do than before they went in, and there are people who are twice your age who haven't answered that question

I considered large universities mostly because of the "greater breadth and depth of offerings" (as a senior in high school, I wanted to major at American Studies, which doesn't even exist at smaller schools) -- but one of the reasons I liked my small liberal-arts college is that it allowed me to pursue a wider variety of extra-curricular interests than a big university would have. For instance, I was in several plays and in the campus improv troupe without having to take so much as a single theatre class. I also spent a semester writing for the paper without having to be a journalism major. A university might've done a better job at directing my focus toward a specific academic interest, but it wouldn't have let me play outside of the classroom as freely, and since that was a huge part of my education, I can't imagine trading that away.

Let me add that for me there was also the fact that I liked being a big fish in a small pond, I liked being someone that strangers recognized on the quad, I liked feeling like I was an integral part of the campus community, that I had a voice.

I got a taste of a large school when I studied at Lancaster University in the UK and threw myself into more refined academic pursuits (this is where I really discovered cultural studies and philosophical aesthetics, e.g.), and I'm glad I was able to have that experience, but I have to say, it wasn't very socially engaging at all, and I think I'd have been sad if it was the entirety of my higher education.

El Tomboto, you went to George Washington??? How was that??

I've kind of been looking at it, but at this point I'm considering Georgetown and American University before GW.

― Aja, Thursday, September 13, 2007

is she a junior now????