Back to Chicago

The college decision has been made, and its back to Chicago for Katie. She liked Loyola when we visited, but said she just could not picture herself there. So she has come full circle and settled on Columbia College Chicago. We visited Columbia in October of 2007, and she decided then and there that it was the college for her. She didn't even want to look anywhere else. As time went on she began to investigate the employment opportunities and starting salaries of graduates in her chosen field, which at the time was Music Business Management. When she determined that she could earn as much being a secretary with no degree at a record label as she could as an employee with a Music Business degree, she decided she better look for a different major. She thought about International Business, thus the visit to NYU, but the study abroad programs did not offer what she was looking for, especially at Loyola. So she has settled on Marketing and Communications at Columbia, and I have to say that it fits her in a number of ways. She has been active in Junior Achievement and DECA while in high school, and her electives have mostly been in the area of marketing. Columbia is appealing in its curriculum in that they immerse the students in classes of their major right away. Katie will never sit in a classroom of 350 students "learning" about western civilization. She will get the core business classes she needs without ever having to take trigonometry. I have friends in Chicago in the marketing and media fields, and they concur that Columbia has a good reputation in the Chicago area. In fact, they said that the graduates they had hired from Columbia walk in the door knowing how to do their jobs. So...the decision is made, the pressure is off, and the deposits have been sent off. Now we can concentrate on the graduation celebrations.