Sleep till Noon, Wring Hands All Along the Night

Today all I've been thinking about is school and the fact that I still don't know what I want out of it.
Actually I slept all day today, so what I mean to say is that for the last couple hours I've been thinking about school and what I want out of it (and have come to no conclusion.)

Right now the two schools I'm seriously considering are Concordia and UNBC, both for their Creative Writing program (though UNBC's is actually a joint degree in Fine Arts and Creative Writing.) It might seem like it doesn't make sense for me to travel across the country to enroll in a program that's offered in the city I'm in, but it didn't really make sense for me to travel across the country to not enroll in said program either. Clearly sensibility is not a factor in this decision.

Something that regrettably has been a factor though is the November 24 2008 Issue of Maclean's, in which they ranked all of Canada's universities. It's not that I put a lot of faith in rankings like these, it's just that I can't stop myself from consider them. For example, now that I know Concordia rarely ranks in the top ten in most categories I can't help but consider the stupid weight of public opinion when measuring how I feel about the two universities. Seeing UNBC consistently ranked highly throughout the issue, for everything from class sizes to student satisfaction, does make the university more appealing to me, even though I know these things don't accurately reflect what I'm looking for in a university.

The fact that I don't know what I want out of university is probably the biggest problem in deciding where I want to go. Do I want to go to a smaller, less-prestigious university? Do I want to enroll in one of the big names that dominate the top ten lists? Will it bother me that when I tell people what university I went to they'll smile and nod even though they've never heard the name in their lives?

Naturally all of this hand-wringing is pointless. No matter where I go I'm going to come out with either a BA or BFA that will do me little good in the post-apocalyptic wastes of the Economic Recession.