Emily Harper is counting on her feet to carry her far. The distance runner has dreams of seeing the world and she made her college choice with those adventures at the forefront of her mind. At Colby College in Maine, she expects to be both very comfortable and extremely challenged for the next four years. Read the rest of this entry »

Be the difference. That’s the challenge that Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has issued to the 1,928 students enrolled as members of its Class of 2014. Aspiring playwright Alex Coddington chose Marquette for many reasons, but that call to action was one of them. Read the rest of this entry »

Choosing a college is often one of a person’s first big adult decisions. For Niall Patten, it is the long term consequences of that decision that carried the most weight. Sure, everyone wants to find a college that is both a comfortable fit and will offer a challenging academic environment, and everyone must find a college they can reasonably afford with some combination of grants, loans, scholarships and parental assistance, but when you are planning to spend another 14 years of your life in school, the long term consequences of your college choice are especially important. Read the rest of this entry »

Munyo Frey-Edwards was a sophomore in high school when her older brother enrolled at Reed College. She got sick that year – really sick – and spent much the year in a hospital in downtown Portland, just a fifteen-minute car ride from Reed’s 116-acre campus on the southeast side of the city. “I wound up spending a lot of time talking with my brother,” she recalls, “and without consciously realizing it, I fell in love with the school. As I began my own college search, I realized Reed had become my base point for evaluating every other school I considered.” Read the rest of this entry »

Commentators often say that the greatest ballerinas do what would be physically impossible for most people so gracefully that it looks effortless. Perhaps her teachers and parents know just how much work it has actually required, but to the untrained eye, Parker Reynolds appears to have handled both her high school years and the college application process so gracefully as to make both appear absolutely effortless. Read the rest of this entry »

Pat Dale puts 120% of what he’s got into every challenge he faces and since arriving at Charles Wright his freshman year, he’s taken on his share of challenges in academics, athletics, arts and leadership. Accepted early decision to Carleton College and given an opportunity to play football for the Knights, just like his older brother, all that effort has just begun to pay off. Dale shows no sign of letting up any time soon. Read the rest of this entry »

Deciding where to go to college might be the only thing about which Natalie Weyerhaeuser has ever changed her mind. That might sound like an exaggeration, but since she arrived at Charles Wright 14 years ago as a bright-eyed Beginning Schooler, Weyerhaeuser has made a name for herself as a particularly focused and driven student. Generally speaking, she knows exactly what she wants and she sticks to it, but when it came to choosing a college, Weyerhaeuser took a different path. Read the rest of this entry »

The day after Christmas, Brendan Rome went shopping and he bought himself the biggest warmest North Face coat he could find. He’s going to need it, because next year he’ll be attending Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where the average temperatures in January are a low of 6°F and a high of 23°F. Surprisingly enough, it wasn’t the weather that attracted Rome to Macalester. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the Charles Wright seniors who submitted early decision or early action applications this fall to their top choice school were hoping for just one acceptance. Jackie Kirschner was hoping for two. Kirschner researched colleges early and found a school that offered everything she wanted. She applied early to both Syracuse University and its S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. The Charles Wright “lifer” from Gig Harbor was among the very first members of her class to get exactly what she wanted: admissions offers to both. Read the rest of this entry »

Davidson College might just be one of the best colleges you know nothing about. Although it often appears on lists of the most highly regarded liberal arts colleges in the country (often listed with schools like Williams, Carleton, and the Claremont colleges) and it has an NCAA Division I athletic program, its Southern location puts it off the map for many in our community. Caroline Thompson is just the second CWA student to apply to Davidson in the past decade.   Read the rest of this entry »