Virginia Tech

As I sit here in my hotel room on my last night in Blacksburgh, Virginia, I have a lot to think about. This graduate recruiting weekend was nowhere near as fruitful as the Penn State one, and I am pretty sure I've made the decision to go to Penn State for graduate school next year.

At Penn State, there are two professors who actively want me to do research with them next year (I will have to choose between them), they have given me a free ride, a stipend, AND a fellowship, and I've practically grew up being familiar with that campus.

At Virginia Tech, I have been offered no money (although there's a chance still that I will) and I have found no professors that I really connected with (all of the ones that I talked to this weekend are either doing research I'm not interested in, or don't have money to give me if I work for them). I even had a Virginia Tech professor that I talked to today tell me to pick Penn State, based on my research interests.

Taking in the data, I know that Penn State is the correct choice, it will provide the best education in which I could thrive, and the least amount of debt. I mean, I can't logically pick Virginia Tech.

The only thing that's holding me back is the "dream"-like aspect that Virginia Tech holds for me. In engineering, it's one of "the schools" that students idolize and put on a pedestal. It's probably the same for law students and Harvard...you just aspire to go there, no matter who you are. I applied, I was accepted, and I would LOVE to go there. The campus is absolutely GORGEOUS: I feel like I'm walking through a field in England full of stone castles (Check out the pictures on this wikipedia page). And all of the students that I met love it there.

Don't get me wrong, Penn State's campus is beautiful too. And the grad students that I met there also love it. I know that I will be happy there :-)

It's just going to be hard to let go of that Virginia Tech dream. Guess they're not the dream school that I thought they were.