With college application deadlines passing and coming up, we’re remembering how nervous we felt during this whole process. Here are some things we did (and didn’t do but wished we did) during this time:
Making a College List
Research is so important in terms of figuring out what kind of college you want, and also just being able to explain to the colleges themselves why you love them and want to be there. A lot of research should go into your next “home” for four years, and here are some things to look into:
Location
This plays such a huge role in your college life. If you really like a city and want to try living in a city, look into colleges in cities. If you know you hate big schools and want to be in a college town, look into colleges that aren’t in big cities. If you’re in love with one location, be sure to just check schools out in that location too! Location is so important since it surrounds you and in the end adds to your college experience.
Price
Price is so important when it comes to your university because it’s four years and definitely takes out a big chunk of your family or your own finances even with scholarships at times. This should definitely be heavily considered and weighed depending on whether or not you or your family can afford it, or if you want to take out loans. With loans being so detrimental to graduates’ these days, definitely be wary of them no matter what school it is.
Culture
Culture is so important because the people around you will either inspire you or make you feel very alienated. You need to make sure the people that go to your college aren’t necessarily the exact same as you, but can provide you with perspectives that will make you want to better yourself and not sabotage others or yourself. In addition, there’s the social aspect that you need to vibe with in terms of whether social life is encapsulated by sports, greek life, or something else.
Your Specific Interests
When it comes to your major, you should figure out if the school will support you in the ways you need to accomplish what you want to get done in college. Whether it’s looking at the faculty or even looking on youtube for some lectures that go on at your college, just looking into these things more can give you a better picture of what your daily academic life will look like if you attend this specific school. If you’re undecided about what you want to study, you should still look into how they assist you with deciding and what courses you’d be interested in as an undecided major.
Research
I know a lot of people want to get into research whether it’s because you’re genuinely interested in pursuing a specific topic or want to add some experience onto your resume, and this is something to look at in terms of how colleges admit you or give you opportunities in this field. This can easily be found in their website, and along with that you can see all the research projects that are happening right now at that specific institution.
Job Center
This may not seem important, but since college is so necessary to finding a job, looking at how helpful their job center is can be extremely helpful in guiding you to which schools have better tools in helping your future beyond college. You can definitely ask your guides or just go on the colleges’ website to figure out how these colleges can help you.
Why Other Students Like/Dislike
This is important because you can get a lot of information about the student culture just from the way they talk about it. Usually on social media and places like Reddit, it’ll definitely be more negative than positive so definitely take things with a grain of salt, but it can help you target several patterns or trends of either problems or ongoing events that would be helpful for you to know more about.
College visits
College visits are usually the same in terms of getting to see the campus and ask a real student some questions. I don’t personally think they’re extremely helpful or important, but I know some people who made their decision because of their visit experience.
Keeping track of deadlines and requirements
Keeping track of deadlines and requirements is so important, since these deadlines and requirements are hard and colleges will not just let you slide in your application late. With every college, there’s essays that come with it and you need to be on top of these deadlines whether you’re applying early decision, early action, or regular decision. Something helpful during this would be to have a good layout with every date and every essay you need to complete.
How many to apply to
First semester of senior year is already so stressful, and you definitely don’t want to be burnt out. Make sure every college you’re applying to you would actually consider going, and make sure they’re a mix of reach, target, and safety schools. There’s a lot of thought and research you need to put in to make every application good, so definitely plan ahead of time and be realistic about how much you can accomplish in this time period while also trying to maintain good grades your first semester.
Writing Essays
The most labor intensive part of college applications is writing the essays. Here are the types of essays you’ll see and how we think you should write them.
Personal Statement
The personal statement is commonly referred to as “the common app” and is probably the most important essay you’ll be writing. Most colleges will ask for some type of personal statement and this is it, your time to shine! A challenge that we and many of our peers ran into was finding the topic that would define our stories. A great way to start thinking about these is to split the storyline into three parts: your past, present, and future. For most of us, we won’t have groundbreaking stories that are going to speak for themselves. It can be about anything and everything, so get creative and try to tell your life story through a creative way. For reference, we both wrote about the most mundane things in our lives and intertwined our life stories through them: Meech wrote about cutting her hair and Ash wrote about cleaning her room.
The “why us?”
This essay is for colleges to ask you why you would like to go to their school. Our advice for tackling this type of essay is to use the research that you’ve done to be straightforward with your answer. If this college is on your college list, there is a reason you want to go there. Explicitly explain what attracts you to that school whether it’s culture, opportunities, location, etc. Be as specific as possible and stray away from attractive points that are less professional. This is the one essay where you cannot reuse pieces from other essays for other schools. Make sure that you tailor each one to the school you are writing it for.
Storytimes
College applications often ask for stories that relate to specific traits they are looking for in candidates. They typically start with “tell us about a time when …” or “how have you …”. These essays are a great way to show them how you’ve handle situations and how they’ve built your character. In these essays, be sure to focus on yourself in these situations and always discuss what you’ve learned and grown.
The fun prompts
Some of the schools that we applied to had really interesting and “fun” essay prompts. Our advice for these is to have as much fun with them as possible. These prompts usually tend to allow for a wide variety of answers that range from serious to funny. Here, it’s important to write pieces that have character. Aim to either make the reader cry or laugh. If you are writing a serious essay, be sure to balance sadness and conflict with positive notes of overcoming or happiness. If you write a funny essay, it is important to be careful that you aren’t crossing any lines. Many successful essays balance on the thin line of being a joke and beautifully written.
The Waiting Game
When you’re finished and have submitted all of your college applications, it’s time to take a deep breath and just relax! You have a few months before you really need to think about college again, so please please please take advantage of this time to connect with friends and family before you are stressed again or leave home!
Making a Decision
College decisions can be overwhelming. When the decisions start rolling out, you’ll probably feel a huge range of emotions, good and bad. If you get into the school of your dreams, congratulations!! If you don’t, still congratulations!! The application process is over and you can be happy and successful wherever you end up. Just know that even though which school you go to will be your personality for the next couple of months, don’t let it define you because it will not matter in a year.
For advice on making a decision on where to go to college, check out our blog post on how we decided where to commit.
Get excited!! No matter how much you hate this process, this is an exciting time and don’t take it too seriously! Each piece is part of the puzzle and it will all come together in a way that you will be happy with by the end of the school year.
Love,
ash + meech
Originally published at http://merakibeans.com on October 13, 2020.
