Wheaton
After my chat with obigabu, I’ve been thinking about my decision to go to Wheaton. In the spring of 2000, I had been accepted to the University of California Santa Cruz and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I hadn’t heard anything from Wheaton, and the deadline for a decision to Santa Cruz was drawing near. So I sent in my decision to go to Santa Cruz and got my acceptance to Wheaton the next day.
Declining WPI was a major decision. WPI has an excellent CS program, and would have given me a most challenging and in-depth course of study. At the time, though, I was more interested in a campus that had a social scene than a strong CS department. In fact, that’s still an accurate ordering of my priorities. Any social scene. From the looks of it, WPI was about as far from satisfying this interest as any school I might have chosen. (Harvey Mudd would probably have given it a run for its money, but they rejected my application.) Santa Cruz fit the bill.
However, when the letter from Wheaton arrived, things changed. All of a sudden I had a choice of well rounded liberal-arts-ish schools. And Wheaton had the bonus of cold winters and (relative) proximity to samo-fools refugees residing in Cambridge and New Haven. So off I went to Wheaton. And the school and the social scene did me well; I’ve got friends and memories I treasure. (And a minor in philosophy!)