I am a junior, and will be a senior next year.
Junior year is ending and I still don’t have a clue of what school I want to go to.
I only know the names of the ivies and prestigious schools that everyone talks about, and have little information of my safety schools.
I am an A student but I know that there is no guarantee I will get into an ivy.
I have only went to one college tour and still don’t know if I want a liberal arts school or not.
I just don’t know where to start. How do I find my safety schools? How do I find out what I want in a school?
Answer these questions:
- What size of school would you prefer: under 3000, 3000-10000, 10000-20000, or over 20000?
- What types of subjects/majors interest you?
- Would you prefer a core curriculum (lots of structure), a "standard" set of distribution requirements (medium structure), or a more open curriculum (little to no structure)?
- How do you feel about Greek life? Would you like to be in a sorority or a fraternity?
- Are you interested in a developed party scene?
- Are you a big sports fan?
- Are you politically active? Is political activity/activism important to you?
- Would you prefer a rural, suburban/small city, or urban/large city location? Related: Are you more interested in outdoor or city activities... or do you want both to be nearby?
- Do you have a regional or weather preference?
- How much is your family willing to pay, and what is your approximate household income?
Answers to these will help us help you.
Look up the safety schools and whatever other schools you are interested in. Tour the campus and get a feel of what campus life is like. If you want to know what incoming freshman’s gpas were look up the common data set. Make a list of schools that you are interested in. Write down the pros and cons of each. Fill out the FAFSA when it is time. It is okay if you don’t have a particular school in mind that you want to go to just yet but when it gets closer to your senior year its good to start brainstorming and thinking about where you want to go your next four years. Also apply for as many scholarships as possible and do not wait until your senior year to apply for colleges or scholarships. Find out what test scores you need as well to get into where you want to go. Check out the collegeboard.com they have a ton of information about universities and what they expect students to have when they are applying to the college. Best of luck.
Yeah that’s okay. I’m a senior and plenty of people including me didn’t know where they were going until right before May 1. We applied to schools we liked and chose from the ones that accepted us.
I found safety schools by looking for schools where the average accepted students’ GPA and test scores were lower than mine. To find what you want in a school, think about what you want to major in and look for schools that have that major.
One good resource is the Fiske Guide to Colleges. Another one is the net price calculator on each college website; get your parents to help fill those out for colleges that look interesting.
Try to get to a few more colleges to visit if you can. And finding safeties is a matter of elbow grease. They are harder to find than reaches, and a lot more important. They have to be a place you are quite certain of getting into, be affordable, offer the academic major(s) you are interested in, and be a place you are willing to go for 4 years. I would not pick safeties sight unseen – and sometimes you have to go on several visits to figure out what schools really fit that criteria. Unless a school has guaranteed admission for your stats, I’d probably try to have 2 good safeties on your list. If for no other reason than it is good to have choices in April if the rest of your list doesn’t work out.
But it isn’t a waste of time to visit/look at safeties – one of my kids ended up loving her safety, got a great merit scholarship, and decided to attend there. She had a happy four years, graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and has been very successful in the working world since getting out.
In some ways you are in a great position. Don’t get caught up in the idea of a “dream school” and the one school you NEED to attend. Find a list with a range of selectivity where you could potentially be happy at any of them. Then see how the admissions process works out. People who KNOW they want one school are setting themselves up for disappointment. And there are so many good schools out there, it is silly.
It is good that you have started thinking about this. Most juniors have not decided yet. However, you need to start thinking about what you want in a university. You should visit multiple universities, including big ones and small ones. Usually students start with schools close to home just to minimize the time that it takes to get there. There are also some advantages to going to school close to home so it is a good place to start looking. Often when you take a tour of a university you will be shown around by a student who can tell you about their experience with the university and why they went there, and sometimes you can also arrange to have a chat with a professor. We have taken tours where there were 20 people on the tour, but have also had tours with only my daughter and I being led by a student from the university (allowing us to ask questions).
Also think about what subjects you find interesting. It is too early to pick a major, but general areas (such as sciences, or math, or languages) are good to think about.
Also, students need to find a university or college which is a good fit for them. For the vast majority of students, this is NOT an ivy league school nor equivalent. There are a LOT of very good universities out there – thousands in total, hundreds which would be a very good fit for some A students. Nearly all good students should be able to find a good fit, but there is no one university in the world which by itself is a “good fit” for the majority of high school students.
A “safety” school should mean all of (i) you are confident that you will get in; (ii) you are willing to go there; and (iii) you are confident that you will be able to afford to go there. It is not unusual for students to find that they get into schools that they can’t afford. You have probably heard about the staggering amount of student debt that some students take on – this is almost always a bad idea. However, what is affordable for you depends upon a number of factors, including what your parents are willing and able to pay. Increasingly many majors require a graduate degree (often a master’s), which makes taking on debt for undergraduate school even less desirable.
You can probably learn a lot from reading CC posts. However, be aware that a lot of high school students are obsessed with Ivy League schools and a few equivalents (such as MIT and Stanford). For most of them they are going largely by the name and “hype”, and not by any meaningful understanding of what it actually means to attend such a school.
It is not unusual for students to apply to multiple schools while still undecided regarding which one they want to go to.
For safety schools, “A” students will often start with their in-state flagship university. Which state are you from and what do you know about the in-state universities?
Post 1 is excellent, and it’s been mentioned, but PLEASE get a Fiske or Princeton Review guide book. This will help you begin your search. You are smart to realize that it’s hard to get into the schools everyone has heard of. Straight A’s don’t guarantee anything at the most well-known colleges. Schedule a meeting with your school counselor too, and ask for suggestions. It seems daunting, but a journey begins with the first step. Good luck.
Be aware that the stats in these guidebooks are at least a year old and more likely 2 or 3 years old. Sometimes they are just incorrect. Once you determine some schools that look interesting go to the primary source, that college’s website for up to date information. Also, most colleges have a site on youtube. Google (college name) admission or tour and you can get a feel for the campus before visiting.
One more thing that you can consider: You will probably want to take some SAT preparation class or tutoring before taking the SAT. After you take the SAT, you can compare your scores with the students that have decided to attend any particular university. If you scores are lower than the 25th percentile, then you are less likely to get in, and if you do get in the university is likely to be very difficult if you go there. If you are above average for a school, your chances of getting in are higher, and if you go there then if you work hard you are likely to be a strong student there, but you will still find many other students who are at the same level. Since most other students (particularly the ones that do well on SAT tests) are likely to have taken some SAT preparation, the comparison is only “apples to apples” if you also take some SAT preparation. Of course, you can replace the initials “SAT” with “ACT” for this entire note. Also for SAT optional schools, it is likely that only the students who happened to have strong SAT scores sent them in, so that the reported scores may be higher than is typical of all students attending the school.