How to narrow down the initial list

imagep
Mon, 28 Feb 2011 18:51:09 +0000

Once you know what you are really looking for, it becomes easier to start narrowing down the list. We immediately eliminated conservatories for several reasons, after doing that we decided that their are plenty of decent music schools within a half days drive, so we initially narrowed our list to a 300 mile radious.

Son is a marching band fanatic, so we then eleminated schools without football programs.

He has interest in being either a music ed or music performance student, so we then eleminated all schools (except for one saftey) that didn’t offer both degrees.

He is not religious at all, and tends to say things that offend people who are deeply religious, so we eliminated all religous schools.

We then looked at out of state schools that were left, and crossed off every one that didn’t have something very special about them (as we automatically loose the $5,000 scholarship that our state provides for going to an instate school).

After all that, we ended up with just 2 in state public colleges, one in state private college, and one out of state college that was reasonably priced and has something unique about it’s music program.

Coinsidentally, this list had one reach, one slight reach, one match, and one saftey, so it seemed like a pretty reasonable list.

There are one or two colleges that we eleminated because they were out of state and at the time we didn’t think that they had anything special going from them - that I later regretting eliminating because I found out that there was “something special”, but unless something goes terribly wrong with the four he applied at we just arn’t going to worry about it.

Probably the easiest way to start is to figure out what is a “must” and what is a “must not” and scratch off all that don’t have the “must” and all that do have the “must not”. That will probably cut your list in half.