The college process is a very stressful and busy time in a high schooler’s life. Things start getting serious in the second half of a student’s Junior year, when students have their first college counselor meetings, Juniors start building a list of potential colleges with their parents and college counselor. Many students start planning visits to colleges that are high on their list to take place sometime in the spring and summer. Your college counselor will provide you with a certain amount of information about the colleges on your list, such as graduation rates and tuition, as well as the programs each school offer.  But you probably will want to do additional research on your own.

Making a college list can be tricky for some students, especially for those that have no idea what subjects or fields of work that might interest them. For the students that have a clear path of what they are interested in pursuing, they just have to research what schools have the best programs for the subject they want to pursue, narrowing their list. One of the easier parts of the college process is narrowing down the list of schools depending on the student’s preferences. The lists are normally narrowed down by location in relation to home, campus appearance and atmosphere, safety levels, cafeteria food grade, and off campus life, i.e. the town that the campus is in and campus location in relation to other towns or cities and the things they have to offer.

But, for the student that does not have a clear path, the question remains, Which College is Right for You?  For students that do not have a clear path or do not know exactly what they want to do with their lives, they are essentially trying to choose a college that will best help them figure this out. For some, this will mean exploring Liberal Arts colleges. Others will look at larger universities because of the great diversity of  offerings and avenues of study. Some will even take a gap year gaining other types of experiences to try and get a clear idea on what direction they want to take with their college studies. Knowing yourself, your strengths, your weaknesses, and  your passions is ultimately the key. That is the only way you can take Polonius’s advice  from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, “to thine own self be true.”