What was your second-choice school?

The school I went to was my second choice. I wanted to go into journalism at Kings College or public relations at Mount St. Vincent in Halifax. But, since I was starting university at only 17, my parents wouldn't let me and made me live at home and go to St. FX.
Sigh ... when I was a senior at 19 (the legal drinking age in most parts of Canada), I still at a curfew ... of midnight.

 

I would have gone to (UNC) Charlotte (like many schools in the UNC system, they're dumping the initial initials). And who knows ... the year I graduated was the year the Carolina Panthers were officially playing. Not organizing, but playing.

I was accepted by both UNCC and the school I went to. Also was looking at Wake Forest, until their financial aid form wanted to know went waaaay over the top. I can understand their wanting to avert financial fraud, but that was ridiculous.

I think I would have liked Charlotte, but unlike where I went, I liked being in a marching band and with no football program, UNCC didn't have one. That wasn't the primary reason for choosing the other school, but it didn't help Charlotte's cause.

 

Like any Boston University College of Communication alum, Syracuse was my second choice. Rhode Island was my safety.

 

A mutual friend says you went to the Harvard of the South. Though, he said it the other way. Harvard is the XXX of the North. I laugh.

My backup was Florida, then Maryland. Got into my first choice, so it didn't matter.

 

Rhodes College and SMU were my co-second choices.

 

Kid you not: I was going to go to Youngstown State to be the next Bob Kennedy, until my folks said I wasn't allowed to stay at home.

 

Since I thought it was ridiculous to spend $25 or $30 on an application to a place you don't have a lot of interest in, I narrowed it down to the ones with free applications and no essay (and who attended our high school's college fair). The esteemed list included...

1) Tusculum College, a small D-II school in Tennessee. Got accepted, still have the T-shirt they sent me.

2) Johnson and Wales, a business college in Rhode Island. They gave me a scholarship, but it was still way too much and not really what I wanted to do.

3) I shit you not, the DeVry Institute. I went to one of the campuses to check out the "communications" program and found out it was much more the technical side of things. They showed us some of those wavy frequency scope things that were supposed to look cool.
I took an entrance exam while I was there, too. It was 25 math questions a brain-dead, retarded fourth-grader could have figured out. Since I suck at dividing fractions, though, I got a 92. Apparently, it was the highest of the 40 or so kids taking the exam that day. The next week I saw a kid in my homeroom who took the test at the same time. He remarked how hard it was and that he had only gotten a 68 or something. I felt bad for him while I tried to hide the laughter.

 

In retrospect, it didn't matter because your folks still decided you were too close and moved.

 

Yeah, when you put it that way, I get the feeling they wanted to get the hell away from me.

 

My second choice was Rutgers, only because some alumni group from the state where I went to high school sent me an application for an academic-based full ride. I didn't get the scholarship, so there went Rutgers.

Oh, and I applied to Harvard because my father got it in his head that I had a shot. I didn't.

 

I really wanted to go to South Florida (which is where my dad graduated), but financially it didn't work.

My parents have saved a good amount of money for me to go to college, and if I had gone to USF that money would have paid for one year.
I decided to go to the local university since I knew that money would pay for as long as I went there.