Latest Update on the Future Move
Well, as usual, it’s been a while. The biggest news I can come up with at the moment is that we’ve expanded the list of choices for our move next year. After some serious discussion about which schools Nicole’s applying to, we decided that we should probably look a little more abroad. Not that we have any problem with Boston, it’s just that certain decisions she had made about the schools there and the line of reasoning we had used to choose the right schools for her had eliminated all but two schools from the list: Harvard and Boston University (at least at that point).
It’s not easy to compare these two schools, but I am of the opinion that Harvard, though probably the most recognized law school in the country, may not be the best school for everyone. Which is not to say that I thought it wouldn’t be the best for Nicole, just that maybe that wasn’t necessarily such an obvious fact.
But resigning to this realization made Nicole feel like maybe she was in some sense giving up on Harvard. It is reasonable to think that if you don’t write your application with the serious conviction that Harvard is the place for you, you might not make as convincing of an argument. I had to concede this, but what I tried to explain was that maybe it wasn’t so much a matter of having a hierarchy of choices as having a broad enough selection to encourage more of lateral perspective.
It seems to me that having a variety of schools in mind that all have their particular strong points would make the most sense. Then each school can be thought of as the best possible places for certain criteria.
For instance, the current list now includes Lewis and Clark in Portland, Oregon. Now, the school itself doesn’t rank all that high overall. However, it’s perhaps the best school in the country for studying environmental law, which is one of Nicole’s top interests. Similarly, Boston University is considered one of the best schools for the quality of it’s teachers.
So, to make an already long story shorter, we’ve added the aforementioned Lewis and Clark and the University of Colorado to the list.