Brain Dump

(Apologies to Nikki for not using the far more amusingly cheesy title I proposed earlier.)

Some of you may know that I’ve been waiting to hear back from grad schools for a while now. More specifically, I heard back from everyone but NYU, the program with the earliest application deadline by far. I was really starting to get worried what with the decision deadline for GaTech being April 15.

So I called the admissions office this morning to ask and they said “Oh, we just mailed stuff out Thursday, so you should get it soon.”

And I did.

And I’m in.

NYU’s Tisch school of the arts has offered me admission for the Fall of 2008.

Which leads to a conundrum: I must now make a choice. I’ve spoken rather a lot with Amy Bruckman at GaTech via email and phone, and she’s sharp. And the work she’s doing? Constructivist educational theory applied to groups via computer-mediated social networking? That’s… sort of exactly what I want to do in the long term. I mean… it’s like someone took my interests and then designed a research program around them. So there’s Georgia Tech looming large in my mind.

But Georgia Tech is in Atlanta, and I am not much of a fan of Atlanta.

NYU, on the other hand, has Clay Shirky. And reading Clay Shirky is what got me into the field the way I am now. I’ve had a chance to visit the ITP labs and talk with some students (something I’m going to due for HCI this Thursday), and it looked pretty dang awesome. Also: NYU is in NYC, which is one of my top five favorite cities in the US. It is full of cool people and places, and that’s a part of education too.

So now there’s a choice. I’m leaning rather heavily toward NYU, but here’s where I throw things open: what do you people think? What’s a good fit? Why should I consider one or the other differently than I am now?

Thomas

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 10:01 and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.