How does one Decide Where to go to College?

The later part of my junior year was also the primary time that I was looking at colleges to attend.  My original plan was to go to the Air Force Academy, since my career goal was to be a jet fighter pilot.  I abandoned that idea at the end of my sophomore year, primarily because I realized that I didn't want to join the military.  It wasn't the level of commitment that was required that put me off, so much as discovering how much the military deliberately breaks you down to rebuild you in their image.  I committed to not doing that, when I stopped taking Spanish after two years, since they required three for admission.

My intended major at that point was computer engineering, which left me with a variety of high-end engineering schools to choose from.  I also had one other school that kept getting brought up by a variety of random family and friends, Cal-Lutheran.  But I had pretty much dismissed it because they didn't even offer my major, and computer science is not the same thing.  I didn't even understand what engineering was at the time, because I had never dealt with anything outside of it.  Pretty much all of my relatives on both sides of the family are engineers, and that system of thinking was all I had ever known.  So I didn't understand the significance of eventually choosing both a non-engineering school and major.

I of course had to apply to both of my parent's alum a mater schools, even though I had zero intention of attending a school much larger than a thousand students.  There was a new program starting in Boston called Olin College, which I applied to be part of the inaugural class for.  They were originally looking for the top 100 students in the country, but that was eventually cut in half to include students who had graduated HS the year before and waited, and I didn't make it into the final selection.  I have no doubt I would be a completely different person if I had gotten in, but I am okay with the way things worked out.

Over the course of those last two years in HS, I began to more fully understand that while I was never going to be held back in life by my academic and intellectual abilities, my social and interpersonal skills were sorely lacking.  So focusing on growth in those areas would probably be more useful that further "studying," but how does one go about deliberately growing in those areas?  Not by going to an engineering school, that is for sure.  Cal-Lutheran had a 3-to-1 girl-to-guy ratio, and was relatively easy academically, with lots of extra-circular opportunities and options.  That was probably a much better place for growing in that regard, but at what cost?  Hardly prestigious on the resume, and I probably wouldn't learn nearly as much in my classes, but is that what I really needed?

They did have a very unique multimedia program at the university, with a high degree of freedom, and I was coming from an even more unique program in high school.  So to my parent’s initial dismay, I shifted from planning to attend a high-end engineering school, to going to a liberal arts college.  The work I was doing in my multimedia class was a factor in that decision, but not so much as my recognition that my qualifications to attend an academically prestigious school were the exact reason I didn't need to do so.  Academic pursuits were not the aspect of my life that needed the most investment in further growth and development.