Questions/things to explore before applying/choosing a school

Parents Forum
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<p>Sorry if this thread’s been created before but I didn’t see any threads like this and I think it could be enormously helpful for prospective college students and parents of those college students.</p>

<p>I’ll start.</p>

<p>1) Find a safety school you really love by finding a school with everything you love about your dream school except for selectivity/possible financial issues.</p>

<p>2) Do research about the social life about the schools you’re applying to using websites such as studntreview and collegeprwler. More specifically, focus on: alcohol use, night/weekend life, and greek life. You may need to do a bit of hard thinking about yourself to figure out how you feel about these issues. Also, although stereotypes never apply across the board, there’s often something to them. Look at what type of student typically applies/enrolls at each school (partiers, preps, jocks, hipsters, stoners, nerds, etc)</p>

<p>3) Look at the sports culture. Would you prefer a D1 school where you can exhibit your school pride with your classmates or would you fit better where sports are more of a cursory consideration?</p>

<p>4) Dorm/residency characteristics. Do most students go home on weekends, do you like that? Do most people live on campus all four years or do a lot of students opt for off campus housing? Which do you prefer? It’s not too hard to find this type of information.</p>

<p>5) What’s the academic environment like? Small classes and a lot of individual participation or more lectures? Do students spend a lot of time studying?</p>

<p>6) Are on campus organizations a big part of student life or not so much? Which do you prefer?</p>

<p>7) Is non-academic life centered on campus or on the town surrounding the campus?</p>

<p>8) Finally, admission counselors and tour guides want you to apply. They will almost always tell you that “there’s people/things for everyone here with x number of organizations and y number of students from z number of backgrounds.” While this may be true, don’t use it as an excuse not to deeply consider how you’d fit in with the overall student body/campus feel.</p>

<p>5) Pretty much all admission counselors/tour guides will tell you “there’s something for everyone”</p>

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<p>This is excellent.</p>

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<p>9) Another thing I thought of: how do you like the campus? In addition to the obvious aesthetic/climate concerns: would you prefer a more traditional campus like Princeton or a more sprawled out campus like NYU or BU? Do you want your campus in an urban/suburban/rural setting?</p>

<p>10) One more thing haha. Make sure you aren’t limiting yourself in your search. I certainly did. I didn’t really know a whole lot about colleges and kind of just applied some places my dad took me for tours + a few other schools I had heard of/sent me mail. There are all different types of schools. Make sure you’re not just looking at USN&WR top 20 national universities. While it can be a valuable resources, check out Princeton Review’s rankings as well. They have all kinds of different categories for ranking which can give you ideas of where you could apply. Finally, if you’re only looking at universities, consider some liberal arts colleges and visa versa. Some people fit better at one vs the other.</p>

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<p>How about ‘do they offer the potential majors I would be interested in?’ or ‘is this considered a good place to major in x or get a job in y?’</p>

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<p>[College</a> Application Questions - Associated Content from Yahoo! - associatedcontent.com](<a href=“http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/8042591/college_application_questions.html?cat=4]College”>http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/8042591/college_application_questions.html?cat=4)</p>

<p>here is a great article to spur some much needed question you may ask yourself before applying</p>

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<p>bummp anyone else?</p>

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<p>Remember that there are 3,000 colleges out there, and 500-600 of them pretty good ones. More than one school will fit the bill.</p>

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<p>There have been threads on this topic before, but is certainly always a good idea to bring it up again, especially as application season starts up again. Good idea!</p>