I've narrowed my college choice down to 2 and I'm having a touch time deciding on the specific one. I was hoping some of the crazy cast of hubski could share some of their experiences of what they chose, why an how it worked out.
UF vs Case Western
Basically boils down to big state school vs small private school. Theres countless pros and cons for each but the major ones are:
Case:
More exciting, in a big city far away, stuff around it, people from different places
Got a good vibe from the tour, everyone seemed friendly and happy
Slightly better academics
Smaller classes/more personal
with the downside that its cold and far away and would come out with a doable but not nothing amount of debt
vs UF which
Debt free
Massively bigger, so more class choices and research going on and more of about everything
Short of class sizes, academically about as good in rankings
But has the downsides of being a kinda culty big school
Have any of you gone through the same thing? What did you decide and did you like the choice? Thank you so much! :)
Do UF its debt free it's a no brainier. No undergraduate degree is worth the extra debt cost unless the major you want to study is either unaccredited or unavailable at UF. No one really cares where you got your degree if you work hard and do internships that's what matters most.
At the other place you are probably going to end up with 20-120k in debt and that's a huge burden to carry when you graduate. You could probably travel for a year or more on that kind of money or be years ahead on your house down payment.
Big schools kind of suck at teaching, but the plus side of that is that you learn to be self reliant which is way more important in the real world. There are also often more opportunities for internships (but also more competition).
There is also a lot of value in being able to date new people without baggage of previous failures coming back. My friends in small schools always complained that everyone knew of their sexual exploits and failures. I never had that problem in a big school and boy let me tell you there was an abnormal large amount of failures.
Did I mention debt free? It's gonna give you a huge leg up on your peers after you graduate too. You'll be able to take more risks with your first job and have more chances to peruse that dream job because you won't have that monthly student loan payment hanging over your head.