So when you're looking around for universities, do you have to have a region or state in mind before you start applying? Surely you can't visit all the universities you might want to if these are the procedures you have to go through to reach them. Have you decided that the university you want to go to is definitely somewhere in New England, it's just a case of which? I find this crazy. PowerPoint is essentially pointillist anhedonia. It makes me sad.We attended a really awesome information session (my favorite of all the ones we saw, and they didn't even have a Powerpoint)
I didn't really have any specific region in mind, no. I used College Board's Big Future college search tool to find universities that met my criteria (stuff like coed, mostly residential, freshman housing guaranteed, with philosophy and political science majors), which gave me a list of about 60 colleges. From there I cut out those with student-faculty ratios of more than 12:1, then narrowed it down to schools with fairly wide-open core curricula (requiring a class from a group rather than specific classes). That resulted in a list of about 5 schools, and we visited 2 of them that were in the same area as 3 my sister was interested in. I hate PowerPoint too. The only thing worse is Prezi.
So was it somewhat serendipitous that the two you found were in a similar location? Do a lot of people not have the means to visit all the universities that fulfill their criteria and if so do many people make 'blind' decisions? I never answered your question about what I was interested in going to university for, but I've been seriously considering doubling up Philosophy with English Literature. All the power to you if you continue down that route. :-)
Yeah, it just happened that they were within about 300 miles of each other. Did I mention this trip involved a lot of driving? Like 3-4 hours a day. And yeah, a lot of people have to decide based exclusively on promotional materials and college websites. Many end up just going to the local state school. Sounds like a great combination. I've heard Philosophy on its own's dangerous ;)