As the school year begins, seniors all across campus begin the long, stressful process of applying to colleges. While the upperclassmen take this step, however, many underclassmen wonder where the road to that step even begins. There are more than 3,500 colleges and universities in the United States that range from small two-year institutions to large four-year schools. How is one supposed to decide which schools they want to apply to? How can they ensure they’re making the best decision for themselves? As a senior at McCallum who’s already begun this process, I feel like I can save some underclassmen from a good amount of anxiety attacks and parental nagging by sharing my tricks of the trade. Everyone needs to keep in mind, however, that this is just one way to start the process, and that there are plenty of other effective strategies. I’d definitely recommend asking the college counselor, Ms. Nitardy, any questions you might have.

I started my real in-depth college search this summer, between junior and senior years, and I made it my goal to have my final list done before school started. The sooner you can start your actual applications, the better. So in the summer between your junior and senior year…

1. Go on your email, check through your stack of mail, and type up a list of every university and college that has contacted you. Even list the colleges that you know you’ll trash later. Just type them all up. When you’ve finished that, add any extra universities that maybe haven’t contacted you, but you know you’re interested in. This list needs to be long because the goal is to lay out every single option you have, then start trimming later.
2. Now you need to figure out what you want in a college. Make a list. Do you want on-campus housing? What majors do you want available? Do you want career counseling services? What academic reputation do you want in a college? One amazing way to answer these is with bigfuture.org by The College Board. Go on that website, use their College Search Step-by-Step, and answer all their questions. You can even save the preferences you select through your College Board account! But I totally recommend writing them down separately as well, so you always have them on hand.
3. So now you’re in Trimming Phase 1 for your list. Create two lists, one for colleges you approve and another for colleges you’re trashing. Now this part takes a while. You need to go through every college you listed earlier and visit their websites. Click around, get the vibe of the school and maybe an idea of its majors, and decide whether you want to drop it or not. This is mainly for weeding out the universities that you know you’d hate attending. Just make sure that when you decide that you don’t like a college, you put it down in the “Colleges I’m Trashing” list. By the end of this, your list should be significantly smaller than before.
4. Okay, so you’re in Trimming Phase 2 now. Here I went a little overboard to find the best colleges for me, but it worked out really well. Now I’m the kind of person who loves setting up a system for myself, so that’s exactly what I did. You need to take list of things that you want in a university, and set up a rubric or scoring system for it. Then go again through the websites of each school on your list and score them according to your rubric. Drop the schools with the lowest scores.
5. Repeat this process around two or three more times, each time change your list of preferences so it’s even more in-depth, and you add even more parameters and adjust the scoring system. You need to do some pretty intense research for each college once you get far enough. Keep dropping the colleges with the lowest scores until you have like 20 left.
6. After that, the selection process is really up to you. My goal was to apply to nine universities max, so at this point I categorized my remaining options into Safety Schools, Foundation Schools, Mid-Reach Schools, and Reach Schools based on my GPA and SAT Scores. Then I trimmed down my list so I had about two schools left in each category.
7. That’s it! You’re finished! Now it’s time to start applying!