Three Ways to Choose the Best Fit College For You

Choosing a college is tough stuff. Whether you’re a high schooler, or an undergrad looking out the far, foggy horizon of grad school., choosing a college that’s right for you is tough stuff. But, thankfully, not impossible.

And even more thankfully, if you’re a high schooler, it’s easier than you might think.

Here is where I’ll give you a four step formula to choosing the right college for you that’ll ensure a low-anxiety admissions process: examining your skill set, research, deciding on deal breakers, and making your final decision. As a teenager, it may already seem difficult to navigate just exactly what you want to be doing for the next couple of decades – a valid claim. But thankfully, self-analyzation comes first.

EXAMINING YOUR SKILL SET

This is the part where you take a step back and evaluate yourself. If you grew up with your parents telling you that you were the best at everything, then quite frankly, you’re already behind.

It’s easy to catch up, though. (First thing's first is to leave any and all ego at the door.) 

Heading straight away into college with a major isn’t a necessity; you’ll be stuck taking all your general requirements freshman year. After that, you’ll sort of need to have one. 

On one hand, figuring out what you really want to do in your first year seems like the most fool proof plan: classes in college tend to be more engaging and reminiscent of the real life situations of the particular field than anything you could find in a high school. Take a philosophy class, or a biblical studies class, or a class on old world piracy. 

On the other hand, letting yourself wander around aimlessly without a goal in mind, if not a major, isn't the best idea. Certain majors and programs have you working on specific requirements in your freshman year, which would set you behind in terms of credits. You'd be forcing yourself to work harder in the long run. And the key to college is working smart, not hard (don’t tell your parents that though).

So self-evaluate. What are you good at? What are you favorite subjects at school? What do your personal skills, however minuscule they might seem, and your interests within the realm of academia have in common? Are you more critical, or more creative? Can you speak well, or explain things well? Would you rather write a book or read it? Does math make your head hurt? Does reading Shakespearian literature? What are the coolest careers to you? What topics have you researched and uncomfortable amount about?

And while you’re at it, be as brutally honest as possible without beating yourself up. You may have a thousand weaknesses, but a single strength could take you places you could never imagine.

DECIDING ON (AND STICKING WITH) DEAL BREAKERS

Thinking back to my own personal college decision process, this was probably the hardest part because I did it after I researched and fell in love a few schools already. Deal breakers should be hashed out beforehand and be kept in the back of your head (or on paper) as a reference point while you research.

I don’t think this is a question we ask ourselves enough during the college process: when it comes to your education, what are you not willing to sacrifice?

Whether it’s communal bathrooms in the dorms, or a lack of sports enthusiasm, or the school being too far away from home, or the school having very little people of color – there’s probably at least two things about each of the schools you’re considering that you won’t be happy with. Make a little list for yourself. You just went through all that painful self-analyzation, right? What are your needs a student?

Mind you, the list shouldn’t have longer than five deal breakers. A perfect school isn’t a real thing for most people – and that’s perfectly okay. It's also perfectly okay to end up compromising on them.

You need to make a list, and a small list, of your absolute necessities in a school, and stick with it. It’ll be helpful when you’ve done all your research and start picking off potential places to learn.

For me, my absolute necessity was diversity. I grew up the only Somali and Muslim in my whole school, and I graduated that way. It was too emotionally and mentally tiring to not have people like me around, and the only way I was active in my local community was through school, so I wouldn't be making many friends outside of school. I turned down an acceptance second best university in my state for being a PWI (predominantly white institution) and I haven’t looked back.

So when you make those deal breakers, make sure you keep your specific realities in mind. Your background, your parents financial state, your personal shortcomings, and your personal needs. It matters because your experience with education matters.

RESEARCH

Alright, time to get online. And not on social media.

I’m watching you, punk.

Get to research. You can’t handle any situation without accurate information. This step has a few parts in itself, so I apologize for cheating (admittedly, it’s also the least straight forward). It’s important to research the schools you’re considering, the degrees you’re considering, and the careers you’re considering.

It doesn’t have to be a very structured research center either -  just grab a bowl of ice cream and start Googling stuff. Or, if you’re that painfully organized, grab the bowl of ice cream, a pen, and take some notes.

It’s important to do as much research as possible in whatever amount of time afforded to you when it comes to choosing a school. Some great questions to investigate online would be whether the institution makes changing majors (or double majoring) easy, what their retention rate is, how their graduates do in the job market after graduation, as well as it’s core strengths. There isn’t a single school that does everything at a hundred percent. It’s why there are dozen different Ivy League schools.

You wouldn’t pass over Columbia for Princeton when you’re going to be doing Religious Studies just because it’s Princeton. 

It’s important to match the right school to the right degree or program as well. This is especially important if you’re going to be going into any science or math field. For instance: if you’d like to be an engineer, what type of engineer would you like to be? Engineering has different degree programs that equip you with different skill sets. Would you like to work in a specific field? Do you want flexibility with your future career? What sorts of problems will you be able to solve by the time you leave school? It’s important to know just what exactly what you can do and which road you’ll go on with the piece of paper they’ll be handing you at the end of those four or five years.

It’s arguably the most important to match the right degree to the right school. You may not be exactly where you think you’ll be a decade from now, but you’re probably going to be somewhere near it. Even careers have pros and cons, and money can definitely be one of them for people who’ll have certain financial obligations in the future. I do urge you to not weigh money over passion, though.

How much will you possibly make?  Is the job pool saturated? Will there be a decline in positions over the next ten years? Could you go overseas with this degree? Could you switch fields with relative ease?

Also, for the record, research by word of mouth is important too. Talk to you high school teachers, family, friends, and even people within fields that interest you. You might get completely new perspectives than you thought you ever would.

MAKING YOUR FINAL DECISION

Well, finally. After months, or weeks, or days, or even several hours tapping the heck out of your keyboard, you’re equipped to make a decision. You’re well informed about who you are, what you can do, where you want to go, and what you’ll need wading through those post-secondary education waters. You may even have a couple of admissions papers laying around somewhere as you read this.

You’re ready to make an awesome decision.

So…pick one.

That’s about it at this point, honestly.

Now this is where the understandable amount of doubt kicks in. What if you really aren’t ready to make a decision about where you’re going? What if your second best option was really the best and you passed it up over something arguably nonsensical? What if you hate your major? Your school? What if you’re making all the wrong moves?

That’s the great thing about life: you very nearly always have options, especially when it comes to higher education. If you’ve got to switch majors, or even transfer, it’s possible. Taking the time to choosing wisely doesn’t mean that you’ll be stuck with that particular choice forever.

HINDSIGHT

No one said this was an easy process. And if they did, they’re either a pretentious liar or their life hasn’t gotten complicated enough yet. Complexity is necessary to existence (although you should save all that existential stuff for your inevitable foray into a Philosophy class).

This is tough stuff. Luckily, if you read all of this, you’re tough stuff too.

So get out there and get to work! You’ll be thanking your high school self in a few years on the line.

LIL BITY RESOURCES

The best website for dissecting careers and degrees: https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-search

Engineering Q&A from the Engineering Barbie herself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qABzig5giHs

About Student Loans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-Lf4ETeiAQ&ab_channel=HowtoAdult

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WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT COLLEGE ADMISSIONS? CHECK OUT THE YGITW BOOK HERE!

LOOKING FOR A HIGH SCHOOL OR COLLEGE INTERNSHIP? APPLY HERE!

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PHOTO CREDITS:

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http://www.downloadyouthministry.com/

http://claytrader.com/

Note Taking: High School vs. College

When it came to my first semester of college, I was a little bit frazzled by vastly different being in class was.  My professors seemed to talk at the speed of light, I never wrote down everything I needed fast enough, and it was difficult to get down anything concrete before they were moving onto the next power point slide. College can be like that a lot – especially in classes where the subject is your weak point. It was different from any of the classes I’d taken in high school because I was expecting what I'd already been used to. Here, I’m going to break down just exactly how note taking in college is different from high school, as well as a guide you on the right path to excellence in note taking.

Speed

In high school -  even most AP classes – a teacher can only go so quickly with the notes. A good teacher makes sure everyone’s gotten what they needed from the slide before switching up. A good professor will probably give you an extra five seconds before moving on.

It’s the nature of the classes, really. College classes (specifically the humanities) tend to be shorter, with more talking necessary to get complex ideas across in a linear fashion. There’s also a large volume of material necessary to cover before the next test, be they every few weeks, or every few months. STEM classes go on longer, but are still just as information packed and speedy on note taking days. Your professor expects you to be jotting down those differential equations at the speed of light, quite frankly.

It’s important to be prepared for the speed, and to adjust to it. It might be tough if you’re a naturally slow writer, or if you put time into the neatness of your notes, but it’s definitely possible. Even if you're typing but enjoy spending time in properly formatting what you'd just jotted down, you might have to make sacrifices. It works in your favor if your notes are disorganized and cluttered enough to warrant a rewrite: take it as an extra studying opportunity.

Volume of Work

As I said earlier, your classes will be jam packed with information. Though, that’s kind of expected. It’s tough covering thousands of years of civilization into four months.

After all that note taking, you’ll start to realize how much work will be going into studying. There might be dozens of pages of information that you’ll have to memorize to pass your midterm, final, and all the in-betweens (if any). Many of us have the bad habit of typing down every single thing that comes out the professor’s mouth verbatim, but that’s not very conductive when you go back into your Google Docs to see a thousand words of your necessary information, littered with unnecessary fluff.

The real difficult part comes with studying. Vast amounts of knowledge are forced into your brain for several months before you spew them out onto a test paper, but most of the time, you’ll be forced to interpret that information in a coherent fashion. It doesn’t matter that you know that Alexander the Great conquered Greece – what effect did it have?

Becoming comfortable with your memorization skill takes time, especially with so much pressure put on passing your tests, but not impossible. Finding methods that work best for you is the most important part. And remember that your professor is always there to help.

Grading

You’ll hear this a lot, but college is test based. Most of the time, you’ll have very little outside assignments. Sometimes, all you’ll be left with for the semester is an email address, a syllabus, and a date for your final. (Honestly, nightmares have an awful way of finding their way into real life).

High school classes mostly grade as an relatively even amalgamation of your grades. Classwork, homework, tests, quizzes, and other arbitrary sections are calculated and graded up. If you didn’t do so well with your classwork, but aced your homework and the test, you could still end up getting an A for the semester. It goes both ways. Usually (athis rings especially true in AP classes) the most important part was getting your work done.

The most important part of a college class is passing your test(s). That’s about it. And all semester, you’re taking notes, studying, and gearing up for them.

This is where a lot of freshman in college make their mistakes. Since they have little to occupy themselves with aside from studying, they slack off all semester, only zeroing back in on their work when a sudden essay or project is assigned. That’s how it worked in high school for them, except those errant assignments are much less frequent and routine.

If you can’t take tests, and at least pass them, you won’t pass your classes. That’s sort of a terrifying fact when you either hate tests or just aren’t very good at taking them, but have no fear. If you study right, you’ll be fine. Your professors are there to help you along the way, as well as your fellow classmates, so the important part is to kick your but into gear.

Using Your Notes

Personally, the studying I did for my first semester of college was like how I studied for my SAT’s my whole year of junior year. Constantly reviewing, revising, and rewriting – although, I was an honest slacker as a high schooler, so maybe that doesn’t hold much weight. None of my classes were engaging or challenging enough for me to study at that level. Keeping up with the classwork and homework was study enough for me on most days.

Your notes in college are your literal lifeline in college for some classes. That’s why skipping a day or two can end up being detrimental. You think it’s cool to miss that Romeo & Juliet discussion for Thursday in your Early Shakesperian Literature class? Good luck writing a decent essay on the play when the prompt is “free will vs. fate” because you expected something simple like “love vs. lust”.

You have to seriously engage with the notes you take in college, and study them more than once. They have to be neatly rewritten, clear, and easy for you to digest.

And also, probably cute looking, since you’ll be looking at them a lot.

Transitioning from High School to College Note Taking

It’s tough, honestly, and you might struggle a little in the beginning. Experimentation is important. If you feel like a certain method isn’t working for you, then feel free to change it. Switch from typing to hand writing, or from a study partner to a study group. College is about exploring who you are, even things as mundane as what type of learner you are, and how to capitalize off your strengths.

So get to studying. You have A’s to collect.

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LOOKING FOR A HIGH SCHOOL OR COLLEGE INTERNSHIP? APPLY HERE!

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