Hi! I’m currently a rising senior, and I’ve been casually looking at colleges since last summer. But now that it’s almost August, I have been trying to narrow down my college list and find that I’m struggling. I don’t have any strong preferences and have the privilege of not being limited by location or money.
I was just wondering if any of you can share your college search experience? How did you pick which colleges to apply to?
Have you been on any campus visits?
Based on SAT scores, GPA, location, intended major/pre-professional tracks, and student body. I personally wanted to pursue premed and live in MA so looking at Boston schools was an obvious choice for me where I could have the most opportunities
I would start off by taking the following steps:
–Confirm with your parents that there are no limitations on where you apply/attend college.
–Honestly access your academics – including GPA, course rigor, standardized tests. These will be critical in determining what colleges you qualify for.
–If you know what you want to study in college then you can take that into account. If you don’t know yet, that is fine but look for schools where you can switch majors easily.
–Get your hands on some good college guide books (ex. Fiske, Princeton Review) which can often be found in the guidance dept. or a library and start reading about schools in your academic range.
–Talk to your guidance counselor in the fall to get help developing your list. If your HS has Naviance that is a valuable tool.
–Try to visit a some different types of schools.
–Consider what you want in a college. Anything you care about is fair game. A few ideas of questions to ask yourself are: What size school do you like? Do you want Greek Life? Do you care about big time sports? What type of location (not just geographic, but also rural/urban/suburban) do you prefer?
@Gumbymom Yes, I’ve been on several campus visits - Swarthmore, Princeton, Penn, Yale, Brown, Harvard, Tufts, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and UW - Seattle. I’m also planning to visit Williams, Dartmouth, and CMU in August.
Just from the general feeling (but I couldn’t tell you exactly why), I did not like Swarthmore, Harvard, Penn ,or Berkeley. Is that enough to simply rule out a school?
Fit/vibe is a good reason to rule out a school.
Budget constraints?
Home state?
GPA? Test scores? EC’s?
Intended major?
@happy1 Thanks for the concise and helpful response.
I think my parents definitely have their preferences, but they have steadfastly said they just want me to go to a school I like and is a good fit. We are not planning on applying for financial aid.
Without being too specific on my scores and stuff, I’ve taken 8 AP courses so far and gotten 5s on most of the exams and a close-to-1600 score on the new SAT as well as good SAT subject tests. Academically, I think I am very strong, but perhaps I am limited in my perspective.
I would like to go into something with Applied Math or Statistics or perhaps something more specific like Operations Research.
My issue is that I’m afraid of ruling out schools that may not seem to fit my preferences but in actuality I would really like. For example, I probably wouldn’t have considered an urban college, but I really loved the UW - Seattle campus and the area after I really disliked Penn. I think ideally I would like a middle-sized school but I also wouldn’t mind a large school. Small schools are okay, but I didn’t like the feeling I got at Swarthmore but I don’t want to completely rule out small schools either.
I guess I can start with this - what universities have the best mathematics department? Or where can I find such information?
In addition to @happy1 advice, focus on safety and match schools first. Its easy to fall in love with a reach school and all the schools you’ve listed (with the exception of UW depending on your major and home state) are reaches for anyone because of the small % of students admitted.
When the time comes to apply to colleges, my advice is not to go overboard in selecting schools. If you visited and something didn’t click, don’t waste time or money on applications that could be invested into making sure you get into the schools you really like. If you’re looking into applied math, you might want to look at universities that have business or engineering schools, both of which usually offer applied math majors. This way, you’ll have the benefits of attending a large university with various research and extracurricular opportunities, and still get the specialized advising and support associated with a small college.
Find your safeties first – where you will be admitted and you will be happy to attend (and can afford to go). Often your instate flagship, but not necessarily. Can be a school where you are in the top 25% of stats and the acceptance rate is over 50%, but if it is an out of state public school, especially in a competitive field such as engineering or computer science, then even that is not a close to a safety.
Then add your matches – schools you have are competitive for, but could go either way. Rule of thumb is that any school with something like below 25- 30% acceptance rate is not a match, not matter what your stats look like. Below 25-30%, they are looking at much more than stats, and turn away many highly qualified students.
Last tier to add is your reaches – which is certainly any school with below 20% acceptance rate, let alone below 10%, such as many of the schools you have visited. If you didn’t like the vibe at Penn, Harvard, Swat and Berkeley, there is no reason to reconsider and second guess, just move on.
Look for common characteristics and features that your liked, and identify safety/match/reaches which share them. For instance – if you liked the more open curriculum at Brown, then safeties with open curriculum might be Kalamazoo, matches/reaches might include Hamilton, Vassar, Amherst or Grinnell.
This is how I personally found colleges, doesn’t mean you have to do this…I started freshman year with college visits/research, not sure if I necessarily recommend starting this early simply because so many things change…maybe tour 1-2 schools to get a general idea of dealbreakers/must haves.
I started by having some ideas in mind about size, location, my desired major. I like medium schools in urban areas with strong life science research programs, not majority pre-med. Then, I used college lists (US News for example) to take down names. I think if you ignore the actual ranking part of US News and use it as a convenient, easy to access pile of information that’s all in one place, then it’s definitely not as “toxic” as people say.
I didn’t know the names of any colleges besides some top schools (hadn’t even heard of Dartmouth yet…couldn’t name a single LAC, didn’t even know any colleges in my own state besides Rutgers and Princeton)…so US News allowed me to familiarize myself with what was out there.
Then, I did some visits. I didn’t have any scores or whatever yet, but using the names of places I liked I set targets for myself. And since I started early I had time to reach many targets.
Personally I made the mistake of listening to my parents in terms of $ too much…we are a full-pay family and at least my dad has very traditional beliefs…(Ivy or bust, not really his fault, everyone around us is like that)…but I have med school hopes. So when I finally thought about it and educated myself I had to give up EVERY school in NYC (where I really wanted to study) because of cost-benefit analysis. Better not to love any place before you get your financial stuff straight. Take a look at lists of full-ride schools for inspiration if you are full-pay but would rather not be.
Good luck!
OP - The way my son started his college list, with my help, was through an elimination process:
After making objective quantitative assessments, i.e. his GPA, class rank, ACT/SAT and SATII scores, we came up with a long initial list of schools.
We then eliminated some from the list based on my son’s qualitative assessments, particularly what he intends to study and extracurricular offers as well as special programs the schools offer. This part of the elimination process was quite critical.
We then went through the Net Price Calculator to make financial assessments. We eliminated more schools.
From the narrowed list, we decided on which school to apply EA (or ED in case you’re not applying for FA)
We then prioritized from the narrow list which schools to work on first in terms of essays, figuring that my son would put greater and more careful effort and energy at the beginning part of the application process. Interestingly, when the whole process was over with, he was accepted to almost all of his top priority choices whereas he was either waitlisted or rejected from almost all the non-priority choices, i.e., secondary choices. So, that strategy worked out for him.
Like you, my son didn’t like Harvard, UPenn and Berkeley, and his initial dislike for these schools wasn’t something we took lightly. Because of OOS public school, we didn’t even bother to apply to Berkeley although I did my MA there and loved the whole Berkeley experience).
From what you wrote of your preferences, including strong program in math as well as location, Princeton came up top of my head that might meet both of these criteria.