Operation “Soaring Eagle” : Choosing a College

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As always, recommended reading consists of all the posts of this series up to this point. In particular, I hope you’ve gone through The Financial Permeability. This means you should have, by this point done preliminary research on your colleges and shortlisted those which satisfy your financial conditions. Also, you should have a rough idea of which major you plan to pursue.

What’s next?

Now you’ve got the job of selecting which universities you’re planning to apply to. Before you can make this decision you need to collect information about these colleges. I cannot be the source of all information simply because I’m not the best source. Besides, I have little idea about the courses offered under medicine, business or arts.

So instead, here’s a list of sources you need to check in on first:

University Website

So, what you need to do now is go to the admission portals of the websites of these universities you’ve shortlisted (based on financials) and highlight the ones which offer the courses you want. I should remind you that you will only find majors listed here, so it will help if you’ve zeroed in on the one you intend to pursue.

This might cause you to strike off a few universities where you might have been eligible for financial aid. Don’t let this bother you. Firstly, there’s a logical error: your major of choice is not available. Secondly, there are other universities to look out for.

However, in most cases, the course you’re looking for will be available in those colleges, simply because unlike in India, most US colleges are fully comprehensive i.e. they offer courses under almost all branches of education. This is where you need to find more sources.

Family and Friends

For some of you, the fact that you have pre-existing relationships with people in the US might have been a factor which contributed to your taking a decision to pursue your education abroad. It’s possible that some of them are currently enrolled in college. Or, they might have graduated. They might even be working. Alternatively, you might have family who migrated there, but are in a position where the children are still in junior school and the parents did not pursue their education there.

Whatever be the case, you need to get in touch with them. It’s not necessary that all of them have something important to contribute to your decision, but letting them know that you’re thinking about joining them there might motivate them to dig around for more information to help you. This is especially true in the case of family contacts. As for friends who are currently enrolled, or have already graduated, if they are in the same field as the one you intend to go into, there really can be no better source of first-hand information about college environments, living expenses, community etc.

The bottom line is that you must milk your contacts to the fullest at this stage because their information is valuable in getting an idea of whether X university is actually any good. X might have the course you’re looking for, but that might just be about it. So ask around.

Third-Party Rankings

This is a somewhat impersonal way of getting information i.e. an organisation has drawn up certain parameters on which to rate universities, such as student-staff ratios, citations by staff, number of international students etc. It then fills in those parameters for the universities, and sorts them in descending order and (tada) you have your rankings.

Nevertheless, rankings are a good way to go about deciding which universities to apply to because generally, they’re right! I’m not talking about nitty-gritties here. For example, I’m not arguing if Y University should be ranked 5th or 6th. But you do get a general idea of how good a university is going to be.

And you should also consider the fact that despite the relative lack of warmth and humanity in reading universities off a list, a lot of hard work probably went into making that list. Therefore, its credibility cannot be ignored outright.

There are several ranking agencies, but I’ll just mention 2: QS Rankings and US News. If you like, you can look for more sources to get an idea of how different independent organisations rate the universities you’ve picked.

Students

This should be your last stop in making your decision. That’s because this is there are no real sources after this. There are several ways to get a student’s opinion about his/her university. You may find forums online where you’ll find students discussing their colleges. Those forums will usually be a mix of prospective students (like you), enrolled students and graduates who might still be hanging around. Take the opinions of the last 2 groups of people into consideration, as they’re in a position to make intelligent comments about universities. Feel free to add your questions to the pile, but be careful while considering the responses – only pick the ones that seem to be informed replies.

Also, look for student blogs (like this one. ) Essentially once they’re in college, and if they decided to maintain their blog, then you can expect it to have posts about college life. This will be a good source of information as well. Also, dropping a few comments should get you replies as well.

Most universities now have Facebook fan pages as well. Also look for the Admissions Office fan pages in particular. Both of these, and their respective

And finally, you’ve got student “blogs” on university websites. These vary in quality from insightful to downright biased. Basically, you can’t really expect a student to dare put up shortcomings of a university on a quasi-official blog. Instead, you can expect loads of insight into facilities, exams and food, to name a few topics. Basically, there is always a degree of commercialisation involved at that stage – to draw prospective students to the university.

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However, now that you’ve got all the sources in place, you should go through all the information you’ve collected and make a final decision about the universities you’re applying to. There won’t be much room for changes after this point, because after this, you’ll need to channel your energies towards researching those colleges in detail, as opposed to snooping around for other colleges to apply to. At least, that’s what you should be doing.

The number of colleges you decide to apply to is totally up to you. Agreed, your financials might limit that number, but for those who have freer reign to decide, there are a couple of things to keep in mind.

• Almost each university (except the odd exception) will charge an application fee. There are ways to get around this, through fee waivers, but you are only eligible if the “application fee poses a financial burden to your family” i.e. if your family income is not enough to afford applying. Furthermore, you will need to go through additional paperwork for this – something which I haven’t explored at the moment. And I don’t think this is even applicable for international students, but I’ll need to double-check on that.
• Time is limited. If you overburden yourself with 15+ applications, you might not have time to complete each one. And even if you do, you might not be able to do yourself justice on each one i.e. your essays (which I will come to in later posts) might not be as polished as you’d like them to be. Essentially, go for quality over quantity, unless you’re really desperate. However, take heart in the fact that the number of colleges you’re applying to can be more than the number of applications you fill out. What this means is that with the help of services such as the Common Application and the University of California application, you can apply to multiple colleges/campuses with a single application. Agreed, the Common Application may require additional supplements, but it doesn’t even compare to the effort you’d have to put in to send multiple applications along with supporting documents.

The next post will most probably be about the SAT, and how to ace it. Stay tuned for more.