What was your second-choice school?

I considered Point Park, too.

But in the end, I applied to four schools: Colorado, Texas, Minnesota and Penn State.

Got accepted at all four, but my dad would only pay for Penn State, in-state.

And then I wound up homesick and went back to my hometown college after a semester anyway.

It worked out well.

 

Being the apparent baby of the group, and because of where I came from, I had a slightly different route when it came to choosing a college ... a.ka. the HOPE scholarship.

Georgia implemented it in 1993 -- others have followed, but the Peach State had it first -- if you maintained a 3.0 GPA throughout high school, and then you maintained a 3.0 GPA in college, then you get essentially a free ride to any public state school (or about $4K/semester to most private state schools.)

Paid for by the lottery; millions have benefitted in the last decade. It is all it's cracked up to be (even if everybody loses it after their first or second years ... funny how hard it is to maintain that B average with a semester-long hangover!) My grades were high enough to know I had no worries about getting accepted to my top choice, my SATs were higher than Pube's(8)), and my No. 1 also had a kick-ass J-school.

Thus, I only applied to one school: UGA.

Knew all along that my parents wouldn't/couldn't afford to send me anywhere else, and I didn't want to get student loans if I didn't have to, so Athens it was. Hoops will agree that my first/only choice was an easy one to make.

(For the purposes of this question, my No. 2 choice was Furman. They likely would have offered me a partial baseball scholarship if I had continued showing interest. But then I flat-out told them I was going to go to UGA with HOPE/a full ride, and they stopped calling. No big loss there.)

 

I went to my second choice. My first choice was University of Puget Sound. They accepted me and I was all ready to go, but at the last minute they started jerking me around on a scholarship I'd earned. So I went to choice No. 2. Best decision I ever made.

 

Bovine University to major in milking 101.

 

I only applied to one school. So my contribution to the thread is this:



Looks like University of Illinois!

 

"Great, I have a trig mid-term tomorrow ... and I'm being chased by Guido the Killer Pimp."

 

My back-ups were Iowa and TCU.

Looking back, more than 20 years later, I wonder what the fuck I was thinking with regards to the latter.

 

Buck--
An ex of mine did the exact same thing, and it sounded like a damn cool program; I wish Ohio had something similar. I had some nice schollies, but still have about $13K in loans left over that wouldn't be there if Ohio had a similar situation.

A good use of the lottery, if you ask me.

 

Much like Ragu -- I had (the same) school as my first choice early on in the process. My family was in a significant financial crunch (single mother with two kids in college) and I was told by this school during my junior year of HS that they would give me a scholarship/financial aid package which meant that I would go to school for free. Pretty much decided then.

I only applied to that school, Penn and SUNY-Binghamton. Didn't get into Penn and got into Binghamton. When I was accepted to Penn Law after college, I sent back my acceptance letter with the rejection letter from college with a note "now we're even". The Dean of Admissions actually called me to tell me that I made his day.

 

Got into my first choice school, which didn't have the prestige of my second, third and fourth choices (well, maybe the fourth choice), but it gave me a great scholarship package to keep the potentially sky-high costs to a minimum.

2. UNC (Chapel Hill) - got waitlisted, got in, was freaking gigantic when I went for a visit
3. Duke - got waitlisted, got in, seemed too stuffy when I went down for a visit
4. Tulane - got in, never visited. My dad wouldn't let me live in New Orleans. Though, considering I would have been right in the middle of Katrina last year, it looks like a great decision in retrospect.

 

I think he might have stolen that from me. Ask for verification. Regardless, he's a cat who experienced two of the three on my list and really you can't go wrong with either. Certain intangibles definitely weren't missing from your school, either.

 

Second choice was Syracuse. It was tempting, especially after they offered me $4,000 a year in scholarships, and some girl in the admissions office called a couple times to recruit. But as long as I got into my first choice - close to home, and after moving so much as a kid I wasn't ready to do it again - I was never really going anywhere else.