<p>My D is a junior this year and we are starting to wade into the college selection process. We are checking all the usual suspects (US News list, various guides, college websites, etc.) but it seems there is a lot of redundant info regarding the campus culture. To some extent it appears they are all reading each others info and distilling a single opinion. We have obtained the campus tours videos for some likely candidate schools as well. I purchased a book that is written by students (Yale maybe?) that varies a bit from other information sources.</p>
<p>This site is great. We came across studentsreview.com and that site is also on point. Are there any other websites or sources where current and former students discuss there college experience?</p>
<p>Secondly, how do you research the strength of a particular program at a school? There are overall ratings for schools (US News...and we take those with a certain grain of salt) but how do compare the psychology department of school A and versus school B? I'm not sure of the questions to ask.</p>
<p>Thanks for your help and sorry for the remedial questions. I used the search function and have thus far struck out.</p>
<p>If you are looking for student reviews & opinions, two good sources are epinions.com and campusdirt.com </p>
<p>Also, there used to be a web site called broaderminds.com that had wonderful reviews, because they used a very detailed but open ended survey for all their reviews. The web site no longer exists, but it was archived -- so the reviews from many schools can be found via the wayback machine at <a href="http://www.archive.org%5B/url%5D">www.archive.org</a> -- if you pay a little bit of attention to the directory structure for links once you've found the archived site, you can pretty much key in to the right pages for whatever campuses you are interested in.</p>
<p>Other great sources of campus culture info are college newspapers (many of which are on line) or livejournal groups for the particular college.</p>
<p>One way to check out the strength of a program is to see what the program's emphasis seems to be. Some programs are very specific in their emphasis, others seem give a general overview...If your daughter is extremely interested in a specific emphasis, fine, but otherwise a general overview program might be better because she can find out what interests her...</p>
<p>We decided how far away my daughter and son wanted to go away to college. We literally drew a circle on a map, and started researching states within our circle. Check out individual colleges on their websites. What companies come to their job fairs for the major you are interested in? What kind of research are they doing? Find out how many general ed classes vs. classes in your major are required. Can underclassmen take the interesting classes (or are they reserved for grad students). How often are classes in your major offered? Some colleges may only offer a class once every 2 years.</p>
<p>We checked out studentsreview, but their negative comments actually helped my daughter decide upon her college, because she was looking for an intellectually stimulating environment instead of a party school...we also looked at ratemyprofessors to see if the professors seemed to be respected or whether they were considered nice because they were easy graders....</p>
<p>don't worry so much about departments - go to a school with lots of options for majors, because MOST students change majors before graduation. :)</p>