Researching for future colleges - be strategic!

   Alright you guys, so whenever we thinking about high school, we will associate it with a time of freedom, of impulsivity, as well as other characteristics, right? Well, whereas I do agree with you that we would like to spend our youth as meaningful as possible, if you have decided that high school isn’t going to the last stage of your education pathway - meaning that you will get to college after graduating high school - I do strongly believe that you also need to be well prepared for future colleges, because the college and the degree that you are aiming for can greatly impact yourself in the future. Today, let’s talk about researching for future colleges, because it isn’t just you choosing colleges that you like - remember, there are a lot of things that can come as a result of your decisions regarding this thing (for example, if you like to attend a very expensive college then you will have to pay a lot), hence you will need to be strategic when it comes to researching for you college of choice.

   The first thing, and probably the most important thing for you to do, is to set yourself a list of safety, target, and reach schools. If you haven’t been familiar with these terms before, let’s look at each of them. For safety schools, these are colleges that you have a high likelihood of attending in regards to your performance - they tend to have the acceptance of around 60 percent and up. For target schools, these are ideal colleges that you can have a shot of attending - by that, I mean that when you’re researching for these colleges and look at the data of students that are accepted into this school, your academic performance along with other aspects are around the same level as these admitted students. Honestly, it depends on your ability on whether you consider a particular college as their target college, but typically, it should fall within the acceptance rate of around 30 percent to 60 percent. And lastly, we have reach schools, which are schools that you don’t really have the likelihood of being admitted - when you’re researching for these colleges and look at the data of students that are accepted into this school, your academic performance along with other aspects are of a lower level as these admitted students. These schools tend to have an acceptance rate of less than 30 percent, which the tip of the pyramid being schools like the Ivy League along with other prestigious universities. For a typical student, they would like to submit their application to around 10 colleges - 2 reach schools, 4 target schools, and 4 safety schools. There are several reasons why people often times would recommend you to submit your application to around these number of colleges in each of the three types of colleges: first of all, the application fee can be pretty expensive (a few are free, other can typically cost 75 dollars), so 10 is probably an ideal number of colleges to submit your application (let’s say that this costs around 500 dollars: some people may complain that this is too much, but at the end of the day, education is a good thing to invest on, right?). And secondly, in this recommendation, they are telling you to apply for 4 target schools and 4 safety schools, which means you are very likely to be admitted to at least one of these colleges - so why do you need to apply for more? 

   Another thing that you definitely need to take into consideration is your family’s financial abilities. Because I know that college can be so expensive, and even if you’re borrowing money, chances are when you get older you will have hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, this is something that you need to realize. Because of this, at the same time of you researching for these colleges, don’t forget to look at scholarship opportunities, too! But if you don’t think that you have the ability to get these scholarships, or if you think that you will only be able to get scholarships that cover a small part of the tuition fee, it’s ideal that you focus more on cheaper colleges - don’t be worried, though, because there are a lot of good (and even amazing) colleges that have relatively low tuition fees!

   Lastly, you need to prepare for college early. In the US in particular, you will need to wrap up your application and start sending them to colleges in the beginning-to-middle of 12th grade, so if you are very serious about getting into good colleges, then definitely start to prepare for it from probably sophomore year or even before that. By that, I mean that you need to be strategic in high school: look at the main features of the college application, and work hard to make yourself a good and competitve applicant: get good grades, participate in extracurricular activities, do volunteering, drafting good essays, etc.