As Feb­ru­ary gets under­way, we can antic­i­pate many impor­tant mile­stones: Valentine’s Day, the day after Valentine’s Day (hello, dis­counted candy!), President’s Day week­end, and of course…the col­lege admis­sion deci­sions that will start crop­ping up in mailboxes/inboxes across the coun­try. It’s nerve-wracking, tense, and excit­ing all at the same time.

My own expe­ri­ence with this time turned out much dif­fer­ently than I first antic­i­pated. For one thing, after sub­mit­ting my appli­ca­tions I had more time to really con­sider what I wanted in a col­lege. I know that this sounds very counter-intuitive, but I had loved some big uni­ver­si­ties just as much as the small col­leges through­out the col­lege search and I applied to a mix of both. Specif­i­cally, George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­sity was high on my list for its loca­tion, the Elliot School of Inter­na­tional Affairs, and the fact that going there would mean meet­ing many other stu­dents whose inter­ests were sim­i­lar to mine.

By the time the fated deci­sion let­ters arrived, how­ever, I had decided that I needed to be on a smaller cam­pus. Col­lege would already be over­whelm­ing whether I went to the school with the largest stu­dent pop­u­la­tion or the very small­est. So even though I’d applied to sev­eral medium-to-large uni­ver­si­ties that appealed to me very much, I had a strong feel­ing that I would aim to end up at a small lib­eral arts col­lege. I never regret­ted apply­ing to that range of schools because it never meant that I would not have had great expe­ri­ences there; it’s sim­ply that some­times we need to go through the entire process, start to fin­ish, in order to gain clar­ity on what will be the best decision.

Of the schools that accepted me, I zeroed in on Bryn Mawr Col­lege, and Occi­den­tal Col­lege. Oddly enough, Oxy was one of the first schools I ever seri­ously con­sid­ered while Bryn Mawr was lit­er­ally my last tour and appli­ca­tion. They dif­fer greatly and yet I was equally drawn to each of them for dif­fer­ent rea­sons. I did overnight vis­its at both schools and e-mailed with pro­fes­sors from depart­ments that inter­ested me. I hemmed and hawed. I majorly freaked out about the deci­sion and con­sulted with just about any­one who would lis­ten. As cliché as it sounds, I even­tu­ally put away the rea­soned lists and com­par­isons and went where my heart took me.

Ulti­mately, I was very happy with my final choice—though hon­estly, I know that I would have been happy with many of the schools to which I applied. After all of the stress of apply­ing to schools, we some­times for­get that it can also be very dif­fi­cult to hold the decision-making power. Here’s what I learned:

• mak­ing pro/con lists is great—but don’t under­es­ti­mate the value of that clas­sic “gut feel­ing” (that’s what tipped the scales for me)
• tour guides and overnight hosts are help­ful, but it’s cru­cial to talk to as many stu­dents as pos­si­ble to get a gen­uine feel for the col­lege and its stu­dent body
• food is key: try out as many eat­ing loca­tions on cam­pus as pos­si­ble and be sure to ask about vegetarian/vegan/kosher/allergy accom­mo­da­tions if that’s a factor
• clar­ify finan­cial aid information

And most importantly…everyone will have an opin­ion and it’s def­i­nitely good to lis­ten to the input of fam­ily, friends, teach­ers, guid­ance coun­selors. Lis­ten. But then make your own decision.

How did you make your col­lege deci­sion? What mea­sures were most help­ful in the process? Least helpful?