<p>I am a sophomore in High School and I am having trouble knowing where to start with my college search. I have read multiple websites but I want advice from somebody who has recently had to do this and what kind of methods gave them success. I am open to any answers really.
GPA: Unweighted: 3.87 Weighted: 4.12
Sports: Two years Varsity softball
ACT: Composite 19
SAT: Taking it next Saturday
Honors: I have already taken six honors classes. I have four scheduled for next year.
If you need any more information let me know. All answers will help. Thank you!</p>
<p>I would definitely reccommend taking a road trip with your parents to look at some of the Florida schools, such as FAU, USF, UCF, FSU, and UF. There are other schools, and you don’t need to visit all of them, but schedule a tour around the campuses and learns about the schools and their requirements. Also, talk to your guidance counselor! They can really help.</p>
<p>I have tried talking to my guidance counselor but she barely knows how to make a schedule. She isn’t helpful at all and I feel like she doesn’t ever want to help me. But thank you for the information about the road trip. I don’t know if I want to stay in state. I was told to get a list of colleges first and then do visits.</p>
<p>Just apply to any school that you are interested in. You don’t have to visit them all before applying. What if you visited a school and got attached to it, only to get rejected, making the rejection even more painful since you had set your heart on going there.</p>
<p>Visit the ones that you are accepted to and then make a decision.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what the responsibilities of a guidance counselor are. Do they typically arrange trips to universities for inquiring students? I’m sure you can just contact the schools yourself. Most schools have some kind of campus tours.</p>
<p>Having gone through this experience with my son, who will be starting college in August, these are my recommendations. However you need to realize that everybody’s circumstances are different, and you need to really find out what is most important to you:
- Sit down with your parents and discuss your plans for the future. You really need to have some sort of an idea of what it is that you might be interested in studying, although this is not an absolute. You should also have an idea as to the type of setting that you desire. Do you wish to be in a large campus or on a liberal arts college?
- How competitive do you believe that you might be for each school that you are looking at? This is always difficult to determine since hardly anyone on this website is an admissions counselor, and those that are will not give admissions chances). A good place to start might be looking at each college’s common data set. This is readily available on the Internet. If you just Google common data set for a particular university, you can find a whole wealth of information in regards to their middle. 50% ACT or SAT score, the percentage of students who receive scholarships, what factors each school looks at in its admissions policy.
- Probably the most important factor is going to be how much can your parents afford to pay for college and how much they are willing to pay. Unfortunately, too many students look at schools without ever thinking about the actual cost of attendance. Each university has a cost of attendance calculator somewhere on their website.
- In the end, only you know your own strengths and weaknesses. A guidance counselor is only going to be able to give generic information a lot of times unless they really know who you are as a person. This is why I believe that enlisting the help of your parents in the whole process is crucial.
- Your future standardized test scores are also going to be a very important part of where you begin your search. If your test scores don’t put you anywhere close to the middle 50% range for a particular school, you may be less competitive for admission, although test scores alone are not the only factor used in addition. However, it does help if your test scores are somewhere in the middle 50% range. If your test scores are in the top 25% of the admitted students, you may stand a better chance of getting merit aid, which could potentially be significant depending on the school.</p>
<p>This is only a general framework, and as I mentioned above, you need to look at each circumstance as it relates to you. There is a very good website run by a former admissions officer at Franklin and Marshall University. Google the name Peter Van Buskirk, and you’ll be able to find his website. There is a lot of good information in regards to the whole college admissions process.</p>