Post Mission Plans

I've been throwing around ideas for my after-mission plans, and I've considered several different options. I initially had the idea to go to grad school, but after a little more thought, I've settled on the idea of going to one of the awesome liberal arts schools in the New England (and surrounding) area and get a second bachelor's degree instead. I love the idea of spending some time in a smaller, more intellectual and open-minded environment to study something I'm more passionate about than my previous degree. Not many schools allow students to get second bachelor's degrees, but after some extensive research (thanks to Princeton Review's Best 368 Schools, and US News and World Reports National College Rankings) and numerous pro-con lists, I've narrowed it down to a loose ten schools:

• Columbia University in New York City
• Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts
• College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine
• Colby College in Waterville, Maine
• Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Virginia
• Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont
• Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina
• Bates College in Lewiston, Maine
• Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts
• Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia

If you've heard anything or know anything about any of these schools, I'd love your feedback. As of this moment, my favorites are Wellesley, Bennington, Mt. Holyoke, and Warren Wilson. Colby, College of the Atlantic, and Bates are close to falling off the bottom of the list (based on what I've read and what I'm looking for), but in the spirit of keeping my options open, I've decided not to cross them off just yet.

I even made a map using GoogleMaps, to mark each of these schools so I could get an overhead view of the locations of these schools! Click here to see it.