Chiming in sort of late on this one, but here's another reason to follow the directions:
While filling out my first app, PUBNAT3, I did just this -- selected a bunch of different places I wanted to go to, and then put "Across the nation" for the last one. After going through about half of the application, I saved and quit, as I needed to go somewhere.
When I came back, I had the hardest time getting ASAP to open up my application to finish it. I could log in just fine, and look at other parts, but when I went to edit the application, the browser would hang for the lonnnnngest time -- I'd usually get logged out for inactivity by ASAP. Couldn't figure out what was going on.
After several calls to both the Careers line and ASAP tech support, we figured out that putting in preferences when the system wasn't expecting it was actually causing it to flip out. I don't understand why it was happening in a technical sense, but OKC told me that I'd need to keep trying to get it to pull everything up, and then remove each location, one at a time, until I only had the first one. They also gave me a hard time about having done that in the first place, because "the instructions tell you to just put 'Across the country'. You get to make your geographical preference choices later."
Oops.
So, moral of the story: Stick with what it tells you to do. We've seen in other threads how
minor errors can cause the computer to trash a perfectly good application - so I wouldn't risk it. The rationale here is good, but the timing's off. Save a preference for North Dakota until after the AT-SAT.
