College Conundrum

[This post has been recorded as audio. To listen to the post being read, click here.]

I can't sleep. Well, I don't want to sleep, either, yet, but I've actually spent the past 20 minutes trying to take an interesting picture of myself, accidentally dropping the memory card into a crack between the keyboard stand and the desk, almost tearing out the keyboard stand from the same desk in order to get my memory card back, and finally managing to get it out of there with worryingly many scratches on it. If you think that's truly a waste of precious time, I don't think you know what I've been spending my past few hours on, namely getting some kind of script for a photo album or photoblog for the vast amount of pics I want to take every day but can't store or publish anywhere, yielding nothing more than a stupid Wordpress account and a lot of worthless downloaded "free trial" programs. I finished my one single diet cherry coke hours ago, and now I've suddenly gotten the incredibly farfetched idea that I want to write a novel. Of course, what else, right? Psychological deterioration is what I call that kind of rambling, and it can't be due to anything else than the sheer lack of sleep today. Now I will move on to the real matter at hand, the reason why I wrote this post at all; my college conundrum.

Who would have known searching for good colleges would be this hard? I mean, I have a basic idea of the kind of college I want to go to this fall, and its description isn't very limiting. It can't be Augustana. It's got have more than 5,000 students, and be in an intersting area. It needs to have a good pre-med program, and it needs to be well renowned in the research and biological fields. Its students should like both their fellow students and faculty, and it shouldn't be too cold there. Nothing else. So far, by the help of princetonreview.com and various education fairs in Oslo I've gotten down to the two best ones: University of Kansas and Hawai'i Pacific University. After some encouragement from Julie I decided to research the two further, deeper if you will, and I even made a nifty Excel spreadsheet to keep track of my findings, including a nice point ranking system. The research hinted at a few negative circumstances regarding the University of Kansas, including a clique-ish and frat dominated social life, isolated city and a feeling of being 'lost' in the enormous crowd of students at the institution. HPU thus emerged as the winner of my little college test, by almost 20%, which actually to some degree surprised me. I made some calls last night to the Hawai'i university, and re-started my application process there (I had halfway applied once before), just to ensure that this apparent catch doesn't become impossible on me.

Hawai'i. Hmmm.. I've been there, and loved it, mind you, but there must be something.. fishy about it. Hawai'i is the world's paradise, the world's favorite post card and fantasy, and now I'm actually thinking of going to college there. Where are the drawbacks? Where? Is everything actually as good as it seems, and will I enjoy it? Will it gain my career? I think so. It has an actual pre-med major, which very, very few schools actually have, and small classes with nice, approachable professors. The only real concern I have is the cost of it all. For a lifetime experience like this my monetary ceiling's pretty high, but I need to make sure I can afford it all. My next step will be to contact the school regarding the real costs, and then we'll see from there. Maybe I'll have to start the search all over again... Cross thine fingers. Do it, just do it.

Labels: College Stuff, Pictures

posted by CK @ 08:07