Reply to Supposed to basically just guess where to apply? What are we missing?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Supposed to basically just guess where to apply? What are we missing? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]For our high school junior son, we started with a sense of what's important for him. This is a parental perspective, to be honest he's not particularly focused on it. We then researched the hell out of schools to determine those that are a good fit. Sources of research: college website, U.S. News, Reddit, College Confidential, DCUM, Princeton Review, Common Data Set, etc. You'll have to use judgment for which information is relevant and truly reflective of the college. We hope to get some visits in, but we're not sure we'll be able to do as much as we would have liked.

After all this, we have a pecking order of 10 schools we like for him. He's trusting us on this process. He likely will apply Early Action to the top two of them (hoping to visit both in the months ahead). If he's accepted to either, we're done. Admittedly, we're not concerned about financial aid, which helps expedite things.[/quote]

Agree they simply do not know enough about college to do this entirely on their own.

We started by going through the lists at the beginning of one of the guide books with DS: Schools with best professors? Schools where students work the hardest? Schools where students party the hardest? Etc. It gave him a sense of what is and is not important to him in a college. We talked about geography, cost, campus location and feel, the huge variety in sizes of schools and what that means for getting classes, student life, etc. That was very helpful in framing the rest of the process. It also helped him to talk it through with us so we could share our experiences on how much certain issues matter.

His next step was to looks at schools ranked for undergrad in his area of interest. Then he added to that list from Naviance based on schools popular with his high school and compared stats to see what would work. That got him to a longish list that we sorted into likely, match, reach. Then he started with the likely list to look at virtual tours, web materials, books, etc. He finally eliminated a few broad categories (e.g. very big state schools), and that helped a lot. The list is still too long, but we are getting somewhere. I'm hoping that by the time he is focusing on the reach schools, he will have a sense of what matters to him, so he won't be starry eyed about reputation and rank and will be more focused on fit. Really hoping to get to visit schools in Spring and Summer.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics