My daughter has narrowed down the list of colleges to which she is
applying to ten. All of the applications are due at the end of this
year. She and I flew to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania today to visit three
of the colleges on her list: Carnegie Mellon, Oberlin, and Kenyon. We
will tour CMU tomorrow, then drive to Ohio to visit the other two. Jessi
already visited over a dozen colleges on an earlier tour with her school.
All of those were located between New Jersey and Boston (Princeton, Yale,
Harvard, MIT, etc.).
Last week, her list still included about 15 schools. We finally used a Pugh
Matrix to prioritize the final choices and reduce the list to 10. Jessi’s
primary categories of interest were Music (Vocal Performance, not Theory),
Computer Science, International Relations, and English. We added a General category to cover everything else (including whether they had a wrestling
team which welcomes women wrestlers). Every potential school was rated
in each category with High (5 points), Medium (3 points), or Low (1 point).
The scores ranged from a perfect 25 (Princeton) to five which rated a 15.
Once the list was reduced, it easily sorted into the 3 categories required
by Jessi’s college counsellor: likely, possible, and very difficult.
We walked up Forbes Avenue through U Pitt (the University of Pittsburgh)
to CMU tonight. We visited a book shop and had an Indian dinner. I am
staying at a hotel near campus while Jessi spends the night in the
dorm room of a friend who started at CMU this year. Tomorrow, we go on
several campus tours, visit some classes, plus Jessi has an interview with
the CMU Admissions Department.
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