Less certain about Carnegie Mellon. Or rather, more thoughts on Northeastern.

It goes back to the same basic argument: academics/reputation or freedom/fun? I wonder if Northeastern’s great Co-Op program would let me eschew the ‘reputation’ aspect of it when job searching—I will have had experience in the fields I’m really interested in already. Does that outweigh a name? Am I caring too much?

I kind of want to get out of the midwest. And Pittsburgh is… in the midwest, more or less. But I may very well be back to Boston later in my life, for reasons other than college. Pittsburgh’s nothing to shake a stick at, but Boston is the college town… I will have high school friends there and a bigger sea of people to meet and befriend in general. But does this actually happen? I dunno. Trying to figure that out.

Do I want that big of a sea of people (CMU is ~6000 undergrads, quite a nice number but you never know, and of course there’s mingling with the other schools in the area)? Do I want to have a significant other? Why is it that so often people meet theirs in college? Why am I worrying about this? Are these just stream-of-consciousness questions that I really shouldn’t think about (probably).

EDIT: NONE of this is to say CMU isn’t fun and social and NeU has no reputation/academics… I’m looking only at the minutiae of differences between the two.

Just more flittering considerations, nothing serious.