My college adventures

This coming fall, I will be a senior, entering my final year of high school and public education. After this year, I will have to pay for my education (barring scholarships of course). The thought of that is daunting, to say the least. I've heard the horror stories of students leaving college with huge amounts of debt that weighs them down for life. I'm determined not to let that happen to me.

Wednesday, my dad and I got back from a little college trip. We went up to Lipscomb in Nashville, and Harding in Searcy, Arkansas. Both of them were Christian colleges, and both of them really seemed to want me there, which surprised me. I mean, yeah, I'm above average, but those two schools were treating me like I was a genius, which kind of embarrassed me, and also scared me a little bit. What would they do if I went to their school and did really bad? Maybe they would kick me out. That happened to my dad, and he spent the next 7 years of his life trying to fix that mistake. I don't want that to happen to me.

Both of them had extremely pretty girls to greet
me. I thought they only did that sort of thing for athletes. Maybe the girls were waiting for someone else and I just happened to show up? Either way, they showed me around the campuses, which were nice. Harding's campus was a whole lot bigger and had more green spaces and flowers and trees and such. Lipscomb was much more compact. Harding has twice as many students as Lipscomb though, so I guess they need the extra room. We went in to the dorms, some of the classrooms, the athletic fields, cafeteria, student centers. The whole time these pretty college girls were smiling and me and swaying a little more than necessary when they walked. Honestly, I was a little overwhelmed with it all.

Then I met with a financial aide lady to talk about how I would pay. She asked about my SAT scores, so I told her. Her eyes got kinda wide and she started talking really fast, using a bunch of technical terms that I didn't understand. I think the gist of it was that I qualified for a lot of scholarship money from the school, which excited me. Then she asked me what my dad did, and I told her he was a preacher. She smiled and said that since my dad was a preacher, I get 25% off at Harding, and 15% at Lipscomb. I don't really understand why I get a discount becuase of what my dad does. I don't think I'll grow up to be a preacher.

After the finicial aide advisor left, the girls came back and took me out to lunch. I was extremely nervous during this part, since it was just me and these college girls walking alone to the cafeteria. Did they expect me to hit on them or something? But they just talked amongst themselves and ignored me for the most part, and that was perfectly fine with me. When we go to the cafeteria, they told me it was a buffet, and I could get whateve I wanted. They immediately went over to the salad bar. I settled for a burger.

Once we sat down to eat, they started talking to me. I'm not sure if they all planned to ask me questions when my mouth was full of burger, but they did. It was a pretty akward meal. Then they started asking me about girls, what type of girls I like, stuff like that. I'm sure I was blushing like a fool. Thankfully, the meal ended pretty quickly, and we left.

I thought it was odd that both the schools did almost exactly the same thing. Maybe they take notes and share them with each other? I'm about 90% sure that I will be going to one of these two schools. The hard part is going to be figuring out which one I like the most.