I feel like after going through the stressful process of choosing the right school to attend, I thought I should prepare those who come after me and their parents. This is a 1-year timeline of what I believe you (or your son/daughter for the parents reading this) should be doing through your high school years to find the right school for you:
Summer after Sophomore Year:
-Register at www.collegeboard.org if you have not already. I find that collegeboard, the official site of the SAT, has one of the best college search sites out there, and it is free.
-You (or your son/daughter) should go through the filters on the college search page and just use filters that you THINK you might want in a post-secondary institution. If you question whether you might or might not want to add something, don’t. And the nice thing about collegeboard’s college search is that, by registering, you can save the filters you set. So the next time you log on, you can see what your filters were the last time your were logged on.
-Visit your nearest 2-year college on the collegeboard list as well as your nearest 4-year college on the list. When you go make sure to write down the pros and cons of each. This will allow you to figure out what you do and do not want. When you get home from these visits, keep these lists in a safe spot, but also where you will remember where you put them.
Fall and Winter of Junior Year:
-Take your pro and con lists from the summer, and update your filters on collegeboard. Your list should get at least a little bit smaller.
-Go through your new collegeboard list of schools and go to each school’s website and ask for admission info to be sent to your address. Most schools will do this. For example, at the University of Delaware, where I ended up, I search for UD in google and go to their homepage. Then I scroll over Prospective Students and click on Undergraduate Admissions. I scroll down and there is a button that says Join Our Mailing List.
-As you go through admissions info packets, look at the differences between the schools and start ranking the schools left on your collegeboard list. Collegeboard doesn’t allow you to do this on the site, but you can use Excel or Word to do this.
Spring of Junior Year:
-Visit some of your higher-ranked schools (like 3 of the top 20). Make sure that you, again, take a pros and cons list of each school you visit. Towards the end of the Spring, you should update the filters in your collegeboard college search as well as update your rankings list. When I was going through this phase, I was mostly looking for out-of-state schools. It was pretty expensive to visit schools on the east coast when I live on the west coast. So my parents said that they would take me on a spring break college tour to one region of the country that I had a lot of schools in. For me, that was the Northeast or the Midwest. I chose the Northeast, and my mom and I spent 8 days driving around Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York, and Connecticut to visit 6 schools. It helped me realize that I loved the Northeast (I had never been before) and helped me to realize what kinds of schools I liked and did not like.
Summer after Junior Year:
-Using your pro and cons lists from all the schools you’ve visited and all of the admissions info sent to you, you should narrow down your list to 10-15 schools by the end of July.
-If you really feel you need to, you can visit another school or two in August.
Fall of Senior Year:
-Narrow your list down to 5-8 schools
-Send in college applications
Spring of Senior Year:
-Hear back from college admission offices
-Choose the best fit for you. However, if you think that you want to go to a school and have not visited it yet, YOU SHOULD GO VISIT THAT SCHOOL. Just one last look to make sure you are positive it is your best fit. This is why I recommend not going to visit schools in August. Save the money in case you need to go during the spring.
I should mention that this is more for people who are looking to go out-of-state, but could work for people going in-state, too. Also, if money is a problem for you to go out-of-state, I recommend finding a college you like, and then applying to the nearest 2-year college to the 4-year university. This allows you to do a lot of prerequisite courses for cheap (relatively). Usually, it will be pretty easy to communicate with the 4-year university to find out what credits will transfer after graduating from an AA program.