The Final Countdown Part 1: Researching Potential Colleges
This is part of a three-part series on Choosing the Right College that will be posted in the next few days. The second part of this three-part series gives advice on visiting colleges. The third part talks about making the final decision about which college to attend.
Choosing where to apply is one of the most difficult and important steps in the college process. It requires a good deal of time and it will have a huge impact on how the rest of the college process goes.
Before you get started
The first step you should take is to imagine yourself in your dream school. This sounds really cliché, but it really works. Don’t think of an actual college you like; just imagine your dream college. Are you in a big city or are you walking across large fields to class? Do you dream of weekends spent doing kegstands in fraternity basements or eating dinner with a small group of friends discussing French philosophy? Once you have a general idea of what you want from a college, it will be much, much easier to decide where to apply.
Once you have a general idea of what your dream college looks like, there are a ton of simple categories you can use to categorize colleges into; size (small college or large university), location (close or far from home), social life (quiet social life or big party school), setting (rural or urban), etc. There may be some exceptions (example: you want a rural school but you love Georgetown or NYU) and that’s fine. The purpose of these categories is to help you narrow down the number of schools you’ll have to check out, not to limit what schools you can apply to.
Do your research
After you’ve thought about what kind of school you’d like to attend, books or websites that have lists and categories of colleges and provide general information about them are really useful. I used the Fiske Guide to Colleges, and I thought it was great. It covers most 4 year colleges in the United States (and even some abroad) and it has about a 2 page description of each school. The descriptions are engaging and well written, and summarize the academic and social scenes that you’ll find at each school. Tons of useful information such as size, price, best majors, etc are also provided about each school. The Fiske Guide also indexes schools by these categories, so it’s relatively easy to find a list of schools that meet your criteria.
A free online alternative is Peterson’s, which provides similar, albeit less detailed, summaries of many U.S. colleges. I would definitely recommend Fiske’s over free but less detailed websites, but if you’re on a budget, websites can be useful.
The students’ perspective
Hearing what current students have to say about their college is definitely one of the best ways to get a feel for colleges. If you have friends that attend colleges that you’re thinking about applying to, by all means contact them. If you don’t, don’t fret, as there are many great resources to help you get a students perspective.
A must-have for every high school senior is the Student’s Guide to Colleges. It covers 100 of the top colleges in the US and provides between three and four perspectives on each school, all written by current students. Topics include academics, social life, why they chose to attend that school, and what the admissions office wouldn’t tell potential students.
A free and equally useful alternative is Unigo. Unigo is a website that allows college students to post reviews, pictures and videos about their school. The website even goes a step further by quoting a variety of reviews to provide well-rounded summaries about each college. While the reviews usually aren’t as long or as detailed as those in the Student’s Guide to Colleges, the sheer number of reviews makes up for it.
The goal of these publications is to give you a feel for what college life is like, and if you don’t like what students have to say about their school, then you probably shouldn’t apply there.
If you want a more one-sided perspective, check out the websites of admissions offices. Many will have videos and pictures profiling academics or campus life. While these probably aren’t as honest as what you would find on Unigo, they can offer a good idea of what campus looks and feels like.
These tools should help you narrow down the number of potential applications you’ll send out. I think somewhere between 15 and 25 potential schools is a good range, and after further research, you can narrow it down from there.
The second part of this three-part series gives advice on visiting colleges. The third part talks about making the final decision about which college to attend.
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