I often tell students that when I was selecting colleges for both undergraduate and graduate school, the things that turned out to matter most to me were not the things I agonized over in deciding.
Would you care to share those things which mattered most, but were not considered in your selection process?
When you boil it down, it was the relationships I was able to develop with particular individuals I worked with as a student that mattered most.
When I started grad school, I had to drive 8 hours when I moved and cried pretty much the whole way, largely because of compromises made in selecting a school. As I had suspected, the research advisor I had been matched with was not a good fit, but then I switched advisors early on after completing a project for my MS degree with the first one. I could not have asked for a better (for me) PhD advisor than the one I had. That serendipitous sequence of events ended up having a huge (positive) impact on my ensuing career, for several reasons.
