[sireat]

Fascinating story that rings true to my heart, but how did you manage to send out 200-300 applications and find the full ride? I remember applications costing money($30-50) in the early 1990s.

  My biggest regret in life is not having had a good advisor in choosing which colleges to apply to. Upon applying to college, I was being given reasonable advice as an American high-schooler in California when in fact I was in a very similar situation to yours(ex Soviet, exchange student, and so on).

 In the early 90s when I applied it cost money for college applications. I applied to Stanford, Harvard, UC Berkeley,UCLA and UCSB, because everyone else I knew was applying (I did not have access to Usenet just yet and there really were no other sources of information).

 I got accepted at UCs and got confronted with the fact that college would cost a small fortune for an out of state student that UCs considered me(and I was already working part time as a programmer for UCSB). 

There were some smaller colleges which were sending me spammy letters, which I ignored, but actually they were quite decent colleges in retrospect (Harvey Mudd for one).

To this day I wonder what would have happened if I had managed to get a reasonable scholarship to one of the lesser known colleges.

[throawa]

Thanks! This was 96-97, applications were all free, except for the postage. There may have been some higher-end schools that required money, I probably didn't even consider those. My algorithm was to go through Kaplan's (or one of those) catalog of all US colleges and universities, request an info package from each college where it seemed I can get a full-ride, receive it a few weeks later, fill out the enclosed application, send it out.

I did some prior research into scholarships and didn't even consider top schools (Harvard, Stanford, etc.), as I knew there was no chance to get a full-ride with my credentials. I mostly focused on smaller regional colleges.

[throawa]

Actually, I take that back. You're right, there were fees for the applications. And I didn't send out 200-300 applications. I just received >200 info packages (not even sure anymore of the estimate, but it was a lot). Out of those info packages, I applied to several schools (probably five or so), which clearly stated their criteria for qualifying for a full-ride scholarship (usually GPA + test score combination).

Sorry for the unintentional lie, I wish I could edit the original post. I guess so many years do weird things with memory.

[sireat]

You did a lot of legwork to get achieve your dream, I really do admire your drive and focus.

Canada isn't a bad place to end up after all.