11
SELECTING COLLEGES Deciding where to apply can be complicated. Your decision and choices will be heavily influenced by high school grades or IB Predicted Score. It will also be influenced by personal factors and it’s completely normal to change your mind several times during this decision-making process! Some college guides and websites provide complex charts which supposedly help determine which one school is right for you. In reality, these charts don’t always help very much. A precise stepby-step process allowing you to choose one mythical perfect college doesn’t exist. For almost every student there are several institutions where you would be happy and successful. If the process of choosing a college seems unsystematic and haphazard you’re right. In the end, every decision about which college to attend is subjective. Most colleges offer a great education, so keep an open mind as you begin the search. Cast your net widely as your begin, understanding that most LCS students apply to about six institutions with the maximum being ten. While the following topics are in no particular order and may not be the only ones important to you, give each one careful consideration.
Where to Start You may have a few schools in mind as you begin to think about college. Your father wants you to go to Williams, your mother went to Duke your brother is at Tufts and one of your friends is at Utrecht. You start by thinking about these schools. For example, if you don’t want to go to Williams, you’re going to have to give a reasonable explanation. (Dad, my grades are just too low. Besides, Williams is too rural. ) In thinking about why you don’t want to go to Williams, you will make a lot of discoveries about where you do want to go.
Web Resources All LCS students have access to MaiaLearning (ML) a college and career information website. ML allows students to take a personality test and career interest inventory to help identify specific careers of interest to them.
Students can create a list of prospective colleges, look at graphs (called scattergrams ) to predict their chances of admission, and follow the progress of submitted LCS applications. The use of scattergrams is described in more detail in chapter three. The counselingdepartment’sextensive website is full of other information about the college application process. Spend time browsing pages and links. It contains nearly everything you could possibly want to know about selecting and applying to college. Facebook is another way in which you can keep up with news about LCS counseling and college admission. It’s a private group so you will need to go to Facebook, search for the group called LCS College Counseling and ask to join.
Reference Materials The LCS Counseling Office also has an up-to-date collection of independent college handbooks. You’ll find some of the more popular references in the counseling office. Providing basic facts, guidebooks such as the College Handbook and the Peterson’s Guides are well-researched and respected. Rugg’s Recommendations on the Colleges lists colleges with strong majors in particular fields. One of the best independent guides is the Fiske Guide to Colleges, which is easy to read, interesting, and accurate. While other independent guides are also fun to read, more effort may be put into being interesting rather than accurate. These guides are typically developed by distributing surveys to students attending colleges. The opinions are compiled, and a reviewer molds a description from the survey results. Don’t believe every word you read. Each year, the US News and World Report, along with several other publications, attempts to rate colleges from number 1 to number 1,000 or so. It is impossible to try to compare a school such as UC Berkeley (with 29,000 students) to Tufts (with 1,000 students). Yet, that is exactly what these rating guides do. Just because a for-profit publishing company has assigned a rank to a school does not mean it should be believed. Use a ranking guide as a reference is not always a reliable resource.
