Junior with very little direction... help?

mikemac
Sun, 07 May 2006 00:50:23 +0000

counting on people from this forum to find the right schools for you is having more faith than most people have in fate and the gods these days You’re a junior. You don’t need an answer tomorrow. If you want it done right, do it yourself. If you want people to select for you from the same 75 or so schools that everyone is applying to (and that consequently accept 15% or less of their applicants) you’ve come to the right place.

Now those top 75 schools are good, there’s a reason there in demand. But if you’re up to the challenge, you can find without exorbitant effort a dozen or more schools you’d like that will provide you with a wonderful education, faculty contact, good friends, all the things you’d want in a college. You won’t do it in a weekend or a week, but you can do it in a few weeks. Isn’t your future worth investing a few weeks of your time instead of expecting strangers to do all the lifting for you?

If you think it is, then you’ll get a few of the college guides such as Peterson’s and spend some time reading thru it to find colleges that might be a match. And I say “might” quite deliberately, even though strangers who’ve never met you and have only read a few paragraphs you wrote are chafing at the bit to tell you the “right” colleges for you. I don’t have that same confidence in any book, so, alas, I’m going to recommend even more work after reading the books. Once you’ve identified candidate schools let me be so bold as to suggest actually investigating them a bit; visit if you can, ask the admissions office to put you in contact with current students from your area home for the summer, etc.

I’m sorry, I can’t offer you an instant solution to your problems. Then again, you’ve probably heard the motto that free advice is worth what you’ve paid for it. If you rely on free advice to pick your colleges, I think the motto is 100% correct.