Your Ultimate College Search Starter Kit: A Step-by-Step Guide
Embarking on your college search journey is an exciting yet daunting task. With so many options available, how do you know where to even start? Luckily, there’s a way to methodically approach this process to help find schools that fit your academic and personal goals.
In this step-by-step series, we will walk you through our college list building process and equip you with the essential tools and strategies to navigate your college search with confidence and clarity.
Table of Contents
Let’s begin:
Step 1: Start with a Self-Assessment
The first step in your college search journey is to conduct a self-assessment. Understanding who you are now and what you want in the future will help guide how you research and select colleges.
Let’s cover a few different areas below.
Action Item: Make a copy of the College List Building: Self-Assessment Google Doc. The “Key Deliverable” means you should have a specific result after answering all the questions in that section.
What are your interests and passions?
1. Reflect on Favorite Subjects:
Questions to Ask:
What subjects do I enjoy the most in school?
What specific topics within these subjects excite me?
Why do I enjoy these subjects and specific topics?
Key Deliverable: A list of favorite subjects and topics with reasons as to why you enjoy them.
2. Explore Extracurricular Activities:
Questions to Ask:
What extracurricular activities do I participate in?
Which activities do I enjoy the most and why?
Which activities do I hope to continue doing after high school?
Key Deliverable: A list of your extracurricular activities with emphasis on those you are most passionate about and the reasons why.
3. Career Exploration:
Questions to Ask:
What careers have I considered or found interesting?
What do career assessments suggest about potential career paths for me? (There are many free career assessments online. Try a few and see if you find a pattern amongst the results.)
What careers do other people I trust say they think I’d do well in?
Key Deliverable: A list of potential careers based on personal interests, assessments, and opinions from people you trust.
What are my strengths and skills?
1. Academic Strengths:
Questions to Ask:
Which subjects do I excel in academically?
What areas do I find challenging?
Which subjects are both interesting to me and ones that I am strong in? Highlight them.
Key Deliverable: A list of your academic strengths and challenges and clear identification of the areas that you are both interested and strong in.
2. Skills Inventory:
Questions to Ask:
What soft skills do I possess (e.g., leadership, teamwork, problem-solving)?
What hard skills do I possess (e.g. Photoshop, coding, sketching)?
What skills do teachers, mentors, and parents see in me?
Key Deliverable: A comprehensive list of your skills with feedback from others.
3. Achievements and Awards:
Questions to Ask:
What academic, athletic, or extracurricular achievements have I earned?
What awards or recognitions have I received?
Out of all my accomplishments, which mean the most to me? Why? Highlight them.
Key Deliverable: A list of your achievements and awards, detailing the context and significance of each.
What are your goals and priorities?
1. Short-Term and Long-Term Goals:
Questions to Ask:
What are my academic and personal goals for the next five years? If you’re unsure, you can reframe the question as “What goals am I interested in over the next five years?”
What specific careers or advanced degrees do I aspire to?
What steps would I need to take to achieve my goals?
Key Deliverable: A list of your short-term and long-term goals with an understanding of the steps you would need to complete to accomplish them.
2. Values and Priorities:
Questions to Ask:
What are my core values (e.g., family, community, innovation)? Why?
What do I prioritize in life (e.g., financial stability, personal growth)? Why?
How much do I care about going to a college that is prestigious?
Key Deliverable: List your core values and priorities, explaining how they influence your college and career choices.
What is my personality and preferences?
1. Personality Assessment:
Questions to Ask:
What are my dominant personality traits according to assessments (e.g., Myers-Briggs, Big Five)?
How would others describe my personality?
How do these traits impact my learning and social interactions?
How much do I like to work on my own vs. in a group?
Would I rather be more anonymous or more prominent in my community?
Key Deliverable: A summary of your personality traits and preferences.
2. Learning Style:
Questions to Ask:
What is my preferred learning style (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, reading/writing)? Do I learn best when speaking out in class and discussing with others, or do I learn better when listening and writing down what others say?
How does my learning style affect my study habits and academic performance?
Key Deliverable: A summary of your learning style and how it influences your academic success.
Geography Preferences
1. Location Preferences:
Questions to Ask:
Do I prefer an urban, suburban, or rural setting?
How far am I willing to travel to those settings? Does it have to be walking distance or driving distance?
What type of weather do I like?
What climate or environment do I enjoy? Mountains, lakes, snow, beaches, etc.
How far from home am I willing to go for college?
Key Deliverable: An outline of your location preferences, including setting, climate, and distance from home.
2. Deep Dive into Proximity to Home:
Questions to Ask:
How important is it for me to be close to home?
What are the implications of studying far from home?
Key Deliverable: A summary of your proximity preferences and the factors influencing this choice.
Community Preferences
1. Diversity Preferences:
Questions to Ask:
How important is it for me to be around people who look like me or share the same culture or values as me?
Conversely, how important is it for me to be around people who are different from me in race, ethnicity, and culture?
How important is it that I have a community of people who share the same academic or extracurricular interests as me?
Key Deliverable: An outline of your diversity preferences in terms of race, ethnicity, culture, and academic and extracurricular interests.
2. Types of People Preferences:
Questions to Ask:
How much do I enjoy the idea of joining a fraternity or sorority?
What type of people do I want to be surrounded by?
What type of people do I like hanging out with?
What are the kinds of conversations that I look forward to?
Key Deliverable: A summary of the type of people you enjoy being around and what you want in a community over the next few years.
Framework for Researching Colleges
Whew, good work! That was a lot of questions!
After completing your self-assessment, you should have a clearer picture of your interests, strengths, goals, personality, and preferences. Let’s now use this information to create a framework that will guide how you research colleges. From your answers, you will begin researching based on 3 key parameters:
Action Item: In your document, there’s a table with 4 columns with the headers: size, location, academics, and school type. In each column, rank its factors in order of importance to you based on your answers above:
1. Size:
What it is: Colleges of all sizes exist. Some have fewer than 5,000 students while others can have more than 15,000.
Why it’s important: The size of a university can affect the student-to-faculty ratio and what the environment will be like on campus. At large universities, you might have lectures of 300+ students and 1 professor, while at smaller institutions it might be 30:1 or even less. This has implications for how you learn and the amount of individualized attention you can expect to receive. With a large student population, it may also be easy to get lost in the crowd while at a smaller college, you can expect to see more familiar faces and be known in the community.
How: Look at your answers to the questions about extracurricular activities, values and priorities, and learning style, and rank college sizes in terms of Large, Medium, Small, or even no preference. If you prefer a lecture style of learning or studying alone, you might then prioritize larger universities. If you learn better in groups and discussions, then smaller colleges would then become your priority. For extracurriculars, consider the fact that you will have an opportunity to be more involved whereas at a larger university, there may be more competition for limited spots in an activity, but more choices.
For example, when I was at UC Berkeley, there were only so many spots available to be an editor for the school newspaper, but there were opportunities to do something similar for different clubs that owned different publications.
2. Location:
What it is: Location relates to your preferences for an urban, suburban, or rural setting, geographic regions, climate preferences, and proximity to home.
Why it’s important: For some students, location is a wishlist item. Being by the beach year-round would be amazing. Or being in New York City has been a dream of theirs. But, for others, location can be a necessity. Maybe you have family obligations or caretaker responsibilities, so being close to home is critical for you. Location can also play a role in the career opportunities available to you during college and afterwards. For example, if you hope to study Computer Science and become an engineer, then being in Northern California where a lot of tech companies are can play a part in your career journey.
How: Rank your priorities based on your geographic and lifestyle preferences.
3. Academic Fit:
What it is: What are you interested in studying and does a school offer those majors or programs? If so, how strong are those programs and what are academic rigor, faculty expertise, and research opportunities like?
Why it’s important: Not all colleges may offer the major you’re interested in and even if they do, the school might not have the strongest program. It’s important to identify colleges with strong programs in your areas of interest and that match your academic strengths and goals because it will affect how much you learn, the types of people you will meet, and the resources and opportunities that will be available to help you grow.
How: List out what majors and programs you are interested in. We recommend having a first-choice and a second-choice major or area of interest.
4. Financial Aid:
We’re just mentioning this now because everyone’s financial situation is unique and there is no one size fits all solution.
What it is: College can be ridiculously expensive and tuition costs, availability of scholarships, grants, work-study programs, and financial aid packages will play a role in the colleges you should consider and where you ultimately end up deciding to attend.
Why it’s important and why we’re mentioning it last: As you begin to research schools, you’ll begin to see costs and possibly do a few double takes to make sure you’re seeing the right number of zero’s.
We want to tell you now that a school’s sticker price, or what you see listed as the cost of attendance, may not be the same as what it will actually cost you to attend depending on your finances and the financial aid you can receive.
In general, for public schools or state schools, you can expect to pay less if you’re an in-state resident. If you’re an out-of-state resident, you can expect to pay more, and in many cases as much as a private school. You will see that private schools have high sticker prices, but they also have more flexibility in giving financial aid, so don’t rule them out.
How: In the chart, you can rank what type of schools you should be looking at: in-state public, out-of-state public, and private schools.
Next Steps
After you’ve answered the questions above, you should have a clear idea of what type of schools you’re looking for in terms of size, location, academics, and type. Even those 4 parameters can be ranked.
In the next session we’ll cover how to use this information you’ve established to actually start researching colleges and begin building your list.
Grab the College List Building: Self-Assessment.