Recommended College Guidebooks

MissSuperFantastic
Wed, 13 Sep 2006 12:55:29 +0000

This is what I did, and I think I’ve come up with an amazing and awesome list of schools that I’m very pleased with:

I started my search at princetonreview.com, signed up, and searched the name of a school I knew. In my case, William and Mary, a small southern public with the feel of an intimite New England LAC. I looked up “other schools students were interested in” and checked out those schools, and just fanned out from there! A college search engine like the one on princetonreview can be helpful, although I don’t recommend taking what it says about your “chances” at face value.

In your case, check out St. John’s on princetonreview and look for the “other schools students were interested in” section of the profile. Also, use the “counseler-o-matic” to specify size of school and majors you are interested in to get a quick list of more schools to check out.

Just from browsing and checking out the cursory info of a school I made a pretty big list of places that seemed “interesting”, from UVa to UCLA to Dartmouth to my state flagship. I then visited a school with a communications program, one without, a small school, a big school, and was able to narrow down my list based on what I liked.

Also invaluable to my search was a list of accredited journalism schools. I went down the list and checked out every school’s webpage and cross-references on princetonreview. I’ve since decided to narrow my search down to schools with strong liberal arts but also a strong communications program. If there is a specific major you are looking for it may be easier to make a list than you thought.

I never once picked up a guidebook. I find them to be too cursory to be worth anything. Why pay the money when you can find the info for free online usually? I actually find the online surveys and quick ability to check out stats in one window and open up the college website in another much easier to navigate than a hefty book organized alphabetically.