When deciding where to do a PhD, I created a decision matrix out of the different things that I thought were important in considering my options, and how much w

When deciding where to do a PhD, I created a decision matrix out of the different things that I thought were important in considering my options, and how much weight to assign to each thing. So for different schools, important considerations might be location, activities, people who are there, academic rating, etc, where each of these are given a 1 to 10 weight for how important you think it is, and then each school is given a rating from 1 to 10 on on each of the factors based on how you perceive it to be. Googling "decision matrix template google sheets" brings up many useful templates if my words are not clear. If you do this in a spreadsheet you can then vary the different parameters and see how close (or not) your different choices are, based on what you think is important to you. Ive done this many times when making big decisions and it usually helps me to quantify what are usually otherwise vague and unclear notions.