Why Ole Miss?

Hey guys,

I thought I’d fill in the time where I don’t have any new updates with my enrolment process to write about all the things I've gone through over the past 18 months to get to the stage I'm at now with my exchange. Today I wanted to write about the process I went through to select which college I wanted to attend for my exchange! In true Emily fashion, it involved a lot of random data and spreadsheets, and plenty of over-researching and overanalysing.

I knew from the get-go that I wanted to study in America. I’ve always had a fascination with their college culture and have always found it so appealing how a student’s social life and educational pursuits are far more intertwined than they are in Australia. My Uni experience is very bland – I go, attend my classes, study in the library, and leave. Engaging in extracurricular and social activities is far more integral to the American college student’s university experience than it is here in Australia and I’ve always wanted to experience that. From college football games, to pep rallies, student clubs, parties and living on campus, I want to involve myself in all of it (or at least as much of it as I can). This made my decision a whole lot easier when it came to looking into specific colleges, narrowing my choices down from the 200+ partner universities Deakin has over the world to just 31. From there, the researching began.

I researched every one of the 31 American partner universities and made up a spreadsheet with all the information I gathered. I looked at things such as world rank, physical size, the weather during the seasons I’ll be there, how many students they have, housing options, and sports.

If I’m going to look at stats and overanalyse, I’m going to do it well. Although I didn’t use all of these pieces of information to make my final decision, they came in handy with determining the kind of college I wanted to go to and getting a sense of what each of the ones on offer were like.

The first cut I made to the colleges was quite simple: I knew I wanted to attend a college that had great football – it’s one of the parts of the college experience that I most wanted to experience, and was even why I chose to go in the second half of the calendar year so I’d be there for football season. Immediately this allowed me to cut off 16 schools – 15 which didn’t have a football program at all, and 1 which was in national division 2. The remaining 15 all compete in NCAA Division 1 in football, meaning that their football programs are some of the best in the country.

The next cut that I made was based on physical campus size, the number of enrolled students, and where in America it was. I knew that I wanted to go to a big school with grand old buildings, public squares with full of greenery, and one that has lots of facilities (essentially, a college town). I also knew that a larger student population would likely mean more majors and units to study, a bigger social scene and overall more student activities and events. Additionally, I felt strongly that I wanted to go to a school more towards the east coast than the west. I’ve always found California etc. appealing but I didn’t really want to go there for college, and I also didn’t really want to go to a state that was, for lack of a better word, insignificant (for example, who even goes to Wisconsin?). This meant that 6 more schools were cut off my list.

With 9 colleges left, it was time to look at the major areas offered by each of them and also look at the particular subjects on offer. After a brief look, I found that 3 of them either didn’t offer units in my areas of study, didn’t offer sufficient options in my study areas, or what they offered didn’t particularly interest me, so they were scratched.

The 6 colleges that remained in the running were Ball State University (Indiana), Iowa State University, Kansas State University, Old Dominion University (Virginia), the University of Mississippi, and the University of South Carolina.

At this point in time (mid 2018), I hadn’t started any actual applications yet and so it wasn’t quite time for me to really look into the subjects they offered. I’ll talk more about how I narrowed down my choices in another post where I talk more about the application process. That aside, Mississippi ended up as my first preference for many reasons. It had the large campus with old buildings and greenery-filled squares that I wanted, great sports programs, students who have massive amounts of school spirit, sufficient housing and dining options, was one of the less expensive options in terms of living expenses, and it has plenty of academic areas of study. I also like the idea that this experience will take me to a place in the world that I doubt anything in my future would ever take me to.

Living in the South will definitely be a bit of a culture shock, but I’m so excited to experience all of its quirks. I wouldn’t want to go somewhere that’s similar to Melbourne, because I feel like the experience wouldn’t be as interesting and educational. I’m so keen to get involved in all the exciting things the University of Mississippi has to offer and I hope it’s as great as it seems!

- Emily xx

P.S.: I'm hoping to post on this blog once a week, probably on a Sunday/Monday/Tuesday, since that's the routine I'm hoping to get into while I'm over there. For now I'll be posting about any news regarding my applications or pre-departure activities to fill in the 21 weeks until I have way more exciting things to post about. 145 days and counting!