If you’re a junior or senior in high school, you’re starting to feel the pressure. It’s time to start making The List: the top three to five colleges you’ll apply to with fingers crossed. The key to finding those top-choice schools is to be honest with yourself and take things one step at a time.
Here are five tips to follow to make sure your school choices fit you well.
Tip 1: Know thyself Before you’re able to start figuring out where you want to go for school, you need to have a good idea of what kind of place will match your personality and interests. As a college freshman, you won’t be expected to have all of the answers about what you want to do for a career. But you should know what interests you, both inside the classroom and out.
Being aware of those interests can help you understand what you want out of college, and therefore streamline the process of choosing one. Knowing you want to play Division III sports or that you’d die without a totally wired campus can help you rule out some schools immediately or bring others into play that your guidance counselor might not have mentioned.
Tip 2: Pack your bags As important as it is to dig through college catalogs and to e-mail college admissions counselors, the most critical thing for any applicant to do is visit the schools that made your first cut.
Kathy Giles, a college counselor at Groton School (Mass.), a top prep school, says students should start visiting colleges during the spring of their junior year. “In March, you should go to four different kinds of schools—a big one, a small one, one in a city and one in a rural area—and just listen to admissions people there talk about what they do best,” Giles says. “You have to know what you want to get out of those four years.”
Tip 3: Dream realistically After sampling some schools, you should have a good idea of what you’re looking for in a college. Maybe you’ve worked your list down to 25 schools, which, given there are about 4,000 U.S. colleges and universities, sounds like quite an accomplishment. But even that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Giles says the hardest part of the college-search process is being realistic about where your grade point average and test scores can land you. “Getting your ‘numbers’ in order is the hard thing,” she says. “It depends on what’s on your transcript. If you’re not within the middle 50 percent range of grades and test scores, you know that you’re a long shot and that you can’t plan on that school. You need to manage this like a stock portfolio, with high-risk, middle-risk and low-risk investments.”
Tip 4: Be selective, then make them select you How many of those “investments” should you look into? “I usually have kids apply to three schools that they should just walk into, without any issue,” Giles says. “Then look at that middle group and apply to four or five of those. Then you have ‘reach schools,’ and you should apply to two or three of those.”
Regardless of the number of colleges to which you apply, once you know which schools you’re interested in, make those schools interested in you. “You have to show interest, and colleges have to see how interested you really are. You have to promote yourself,” says Giles. “You have to do to the information sessions. If you have an athletic interest, you need to contact those people and send a tape and letter from your coach to get them interested in you.”
Tip 5: Get started early In all aspects of the college search process, head starts are crucial to achieve results with which you’re happy. Giles and her students like rolling admission and early-action programs. “They give you the benefit of an early read,” she says. “You get the news in December, so you can adjust your admissions strategies from there if you have to.”
But be wary of binding early-decision programs. They mandate that you attend the school if you are admitted under early decision. While the college search is unpredictable and intimidating, following these tips can help you get into a great school (and make sure you’re not stressing out too much to enjoy your senior year).
Jon Paul Morosi is a student at Harvard University.
