<p>I’m sorry to hear you find yourself in such a predicament. Maybe it’s not productive comparing yourself with your peers who are going to BC and Harvard. Maybe you should be comparing yourself with peers who have a B/B- average and an 1860. There are lots of them in your school.</p>
<p>There’s a college where you can fit in, be happy, and do well. Who cares if it’s not BC or Harvard? You wouldn’t be happy at Harvard anyway, it seems. So begin with asking yourself what you’d like to do in college and later in life. Write that down. Then ask yourself in what part of the country you’d like to go to college and why. Write that down. Then ask yourself what college majors might serve your plans for what you want to do in college and later on. Make note of that. Then buy or take out of a library a handbook on colleges like Fiske or Princeton. Look in these books for colleges in the part of the country where you’d like to live. Look also at the College Confidential College Search database. In that region’s colleges, look for several large state universities, several mid-size privates, and several small liberal arts colleges. Then see if in those 9 or 10 colleges you can find any that offer activities that satisfy what you think you might want to do in college and majors that satisfy that and what you might want to do with your life.</p>
<p>When you come up with a bunch of colleges, choose one in each category and ask your parents to provide the information from last year’s income tax returns and complete each college’s “net price calculator.” This will give you the most important information so far: what your family is going to have to pay (known as the Expected Family Contribution or EFC) at each of these “sample” colleges in addition to what the college will provide in grant money. Knowing your EFC will help you to decide whether you can likely afford to go to college outside of your own state, what kind of college might be least expensive for your family, etc.</p>
<p>Knowing whether or not you can afford a college is the first step in knowing where to look for a college you CAN attend. This criterion will remove hundreds of schools from your database. Start looking for those colleges. Read up on their scholarships, the majors they offer, the kinds of research experiences they provide, your family’s likely etc. You’ll start to find places you want to know more about and, more frequently, places you don’t want to attend.</p>
<p>Your goal is a list of 6-8 schools, several in each category of “reach, match, safety.” A safety has to be one you can be certain of 1) getting into, 2) being able to afford, and 3) wanting to attend no matter what. Visiting the safety is probably more important than visiting the reach, since by definition you’re not likely to get into the reach.</p>
<p>The process of finding a college is not something you were born to do. Nothing in your DNA prepares you for this. But it is an important part of learning who you are and what you might do with your life, so think of it as an exercise in self-identification. You can do this. </p>
<p>Having said all this, if you do all this work and still don’t feel motivated to go to college, then maybe you’ll want to talk to your parents about what you might want to do instead of going to college right away. Again, don’t measure yourself against your prep school peers. But that’s the subject of another post. </p>
<p>Happy Holidays, Jalape</p>