The decision

College.

Where do I go? I've narrowed it down to CU, Yale, and Reed. Why do I like these colleges? Haha, good question.

CU, the University of Colorado, is the home team. It would let me work close to home, and maybe live in my own house. I'm already pretty familiar with the campus, because my mom works there, so I've been visiting since I was a kid. It has the best food of the three, no question, what with the buffet and all the restaurants and everything. Even the dorm door is really good, if you're in a dorm with food. CU is pretty strong in physics, with I think two Nobel Prize winners. They've got particle traps and quantums and such. The math department is also pretty good, although it is strikingly male-dominated, more so than CU at large. The mountains are beautiful, as is Boulder in general. Speaking of Boulder, it's a great city, and although it is mainly leftist, you can always find a rightman nearby. The campus itself is also left-leaning, although less so than the city. Denver is less than an hour away, as is the DIA (Denver International Airport). A lot of my friends are going to CU, including Alici and Ellie. They have a small but strong teaching program in the College of Arts and Sciences, in which you do a lot of actual work with kids, and get a teaching license for Colorado at the end of four years. Upon graduation with the teaching program, you have guaranteed job placement. CU is the biggest college of the three, and there are a lot of extracurriculars.

Reed is the crazy one. It's the farthest left of all three colleges, and its student body is accepting and kind. There are lots of strange quirks such as the Naked Tree, which is a tree in which people get naked. Folks do drugs pretty openly, although there is no pressure to participate. The CSOs (Community Safety Officers, pronounced "sizzos") keep the campus safe, and seem to get along well with most of the students, except for one specific CSO. I forget his name. Portland is a nice city, with Voodoo Donuts and Powell's Books. Not as cool as Boulder, though. Reed physics is strong, and they have the only nuclear reactor run by undergraduates in the world. That reactor is really cool. Math is similarly nice, although a bit male-dominated. The campus is small, the smallest of the three by far, and I had it basically memorized within two hours. The dorms are nice, but difficult to get into after freshman year. I'd say Reed has the worst housing of the three. It's got a sizable art community, but no school choir, from what I can tell. It seems like a nice place to be. The "canyon" is pretty, and full of wildlife. It's also really easy to get into a grad school from Reed.

Yale is the Yale option. A big selling point is the name. Yale is famous, and a part of me feels so grateful for being admitted that I feel like I have to go. It has the best dorms out of the three, with 14 residential colleges, each with their own traditions, which form teams within Yale. These colleges have FroCos, or Freshman Councilors, who help freshies get acquainted. Students can stay at their residential college all four years, if they so choose, and most do. Students live in suites of anywhere from two to five people. Really, the residences are a lot of what attracts me to Yale. The classes are probably pretty great, given the big names that Yale hires. Physics is actually a pretty small program, with only about 20 students. Mathematics is even smaller, as nobody I asked even knew of a math major. This of course means I'm likely to get all sorts of attention. The Peabody Museum is amazing, and is a place I would love to work. There are lots of music groups, mostly a cappella, and the Glee Club (which is the Yale choir) also seems very fun. Yale is where Jackson went, although that's not really helpful information. New Haven is okay, I guess. It didn't seem too interesting, but I didn't really go many places. Still, I really love Yale.

Then there's the issue of money. It's kind of separate, and it's hard to say how much weight to put on cost. Still, there it is. CU costs about $25,000. Reed costs about $55,000. Yale costs about $70,000. If I go to Yale, we're thinking I'll owe my parents $10,000 a year, which I think is reasonable. So that's also information. Which factors into the decision.