As a high schooler, college applications have to be one of the more daunting tasks you’ll encounter in all four years, hands down. You can first begin to sense it around September and October of senior year when the air in the senior hallway always seems to be thick with flying rumors about what so-and-so’s older sibling told them about college apps, or the latest hushed speculation of where people might be applying. The trickiest part of this is simply wading through the reams of advice you'll get, trying to figure out what's sensible, and what's bogus. While I'm certainly not an expert on the college application process, the aim of this article is just to go through with the fresh perspective of someone who ran the college application gauntlet last year and dispel a few rumors about the application process I ran into at one point or another.
Myth 1: Private colleges of academic merit are totally unaffordable.
Verdict: Somewhat false
Cost is always a tricky subject when it comes to colleges, because there’s not one easy answer. Some students get no parental help whatsoever and have to take it all out in loans; others get a blank check to spend on the college of their choice. No matter what your financial situation is, the one thing you must do is talk to your parents. You need to have a realistic view of how much money you can spend, so you know where to apply. But even if your parents don’t want to spend more than $10K or $20K per year, the elite universities aren’t out of your reach. It just takes a little judicious planning to get what you want. First off: don’t believe everything you read on a college website. Sometimes what they don't tell you can be beneficial to you, and sometimes... not so beneficial. Some colleges have merit scholarships they don’t tell you about online; Wash U, for example, has Eliot Scholarships that get awarded to some of the people who apply for scholarships but don’t win one. On the other hand, colleges love to play up their financial aid programs, which sound great but in the end are unpredictable. Lots of factors can affect your financial aid decision. If you’re a second or third child with a sibling in college, you’ll do better off than someone with no siblings in college; my sister got a significantly smaller amount of financial aid than I did in the application process, and our financial information had hardly changed in a year. The safest bet is not to rely on financial aid in assuming you’re going to be able to attend a school, but at the same time don’t rule schools out completely because they don’t offer merit scholarships. Essentially, don’t get your heart set on any particular college if they don’t offer merit because you don’t really know what you’ll get; but on the other hand, don’t rule it out completely.
Myth 2: Applying to college takes a ton of time and planning.
Verdict: 100% TRUE
Nothing saves you more time than planning in advance. Get a spreadsheet together with all of the colleges you might apply to and put all of the following on it: application due dates, due dates for merit scholarship applications, cost to apply, whether the school is on the Common App, whether you’ve sent a transcript, ACT scores, and/or SAT scores. This will be your best friend as you’re scratching your head at 11:30 at night trying to figure out what else you need to submit for all your colleges by the next morning. This planning isn’t all just trying to hit deadlines, though; you’ve got to take some time to sit down and figure out what you prefer in a college in terms of size, location, and a number of other factors. This will help you in the long run when you’ve got to do that dance of weighing cost against your personal preference and actually pick a college. Don’t forget to look at what sort of activities a school advertises on their website; I have a friend whose decision was swayed by the lack of community service clubs at one school she visited. Finally, if your school has a college counselor, become good friends with them right off the bat. They’ll help you stay on top of what you need to submit, like transcripts, and you never know when you might need them to send a last-minute application out on a snow day (this happened to me!). Also, recommendations should be requested way in advance of when you need them. Speaking as one who had a few last-minute recommendation requests, teachers will be SO much happier with you if you ask far in advance, and it’s good to keep them feeling some goodwill towards you since you are asking for a recommendation, after all.
Myth 3: The more applications, the better.
Verdict: Mostly false
It seems like everyone knows one of those quintessential overachievers, those nervous types determined to hammer out as many gosh-darned applications as they can physically manage within a 4-month period because “well, I need as many options as I can get!” But I’m telling you right now: it’s not worth it. Watch them as December 31 starts rolling around. Watch for the signs; the nervous twitches, repetitive finger tapping, the anxious jitter about them that tells you they’re a breath away from having a nervous breakdown. If not then, wait until it’s time to actually pick a college and they go through the roof making pro/con lists and waffling back and forth. In case you haven't figured it out yet, quantity is definitely not the way to go with college apps. As someone who applied to fourteen schools last year, I can tell you with 100% certainty it’s not worth it. When it came time to pick a college, I ended up brushing half of them off without even thinking too hard about it, and then where was all my hard work? A good number of applications is somewhere around eight; enough that you’ve got options, but that you still have time to think long and hard about each school and its application. Resist the urge to send out a blanket of applications – I know when I was applying, I just thought to myself, well, it can’t hurt to have just one more application out there! But it really does. College applications aren’t free; even if they don’t cost any money to send in (which most do), you’re still spending a lot of time on the essays, and even on just filling out the form itself! A general rule of thumb is to look at one of your backup schools, and ask yourself “If it came down to these two, would I rather go to the backup school?” And if the answer is yes, don’t waste your time applying to whatever random school you were looking at applying to. For example, I could have saved myself a lot of time by taking the time to think that, even if I got the half-tuition scholarship at Mount Holyoke, I wouldn’t actually want to spend four years in the middle of rural Massachusetts at an all-girls school (not that it’s not a good school – it’s just not for me!). A word to the wise when picking backup schools: while most people simply apply to their state schools, do a little research about public schools in other states. If your state’s biggest public school doesn’t give out many full rides, but many of the states near you do, it would be much more productive just to apply to the out-of-state ones if you were confident you could get a scholarship. College apps are a case where quality is much more important than quantity. Each individual college won’t know how many applications you put out or how much work you did cumulatively; they’re only going to see what you send them, the words you put on their application… so what you write better be worthwhile!
Myth 4: Any scholarship is a good scholarship.
Verdict: Surprisingly, NOT TRUE!
Ok, I can already see the sideways glances at this one. Money is money, right? Does it really matter what sort of a package it comes in? Speaking from experience here, the answer to that is yes! Firstly consider the amazing power the word “scholarship” has. Would you be able to turn down a full ride to a school you didn’t actually have any interest in? The rule of thumb here is if you don’t want to go there, don’t apply. Sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how many people don’t follow that advice and realize only too late that they have absolutely no interest in a school; usually right after they’re offered a big scholarship to go there. It seems to me that it’s always the ones you think “Nah, that’s not for me” that end up offering you the big bucks. So for your own sake, going back to quality > quantity, don’t apply to places just because they give out good scholarships (unless you don’t have many other options). You’ve also got to look out for one of those insidious deals with the devil that can look like a blessing in disguise: the single-program scholarship. Many schools offer them, and they often sound like great opportunities: a science scholarship that admits you into (and locks you into) a particular program of study, or a medical full-tuition undergrad scholarship that guarantees admittance and full tuition for medical school. Sounds great, huh? Now think about this: what if you want to change your major? What if you get into your sophomore year and decide that rather than be a pre-med student, you want to study English? You either lose your scholarship, or end up wasting time pursuing a degree you don’t actually want. Unless you know with a hundred percent certainty that you want to pursue one specific field and there’s no possibility that would ever change, be very, very cautious about committing yourself to these scholarships.
Myth 5: There is one “perfect school” out there for you.
Verdict: I’m gonna say…FALSE.
In the interests of full disclosure, I’m going to say that this, perhaps, is the “advice” I’m most annoyed about receiving time after time. I can’t count the number of time’s I’ve had someone tell me that there’ll be one college where you step on the campus and “you can just see yourself there,” and “it just feels right.” Having gone through the whole college decision process without finding a “dream school,” I’m a little more skeptical. Here’s my take on it. Different schools can have very different atmospheres. American University, in downtown Washington, D.C., isn’t going to feel very similar to Oberlin, in rural Ohio. The University of Michigan, bustling with a cumulative 41,000 students, will exude a very different feel than that of the small, Floridan New College, which numbers a whopping 800 students. Yes, schools have their own atmospheres. However, if you took the time to visit all of the hundreds, maybe even thousands of colleges and universities in the U.S., I’d think there would be at least four, five, maybe even ten schools that you really liked. And you’d like the rest of them to different degrees. So here’s my point. By setting up this mythical image of some utopian college that is out there for you, well-meaning advisors more often than not set you up for disappointment. What about all those colleges you kind of liked, but not as much as your “first choice?” What if it came down to spending $50K a year at your dream school, or $10K at an okay one? Is that utopian dream worth an extra $160,000 over four years? By trying to paint a picture of some ideal school, well-intentioned people set you up with the expectation that either you follow your heart and shell out the big bucks, or you sell out. I’m going to tell you right now: it’s not like that. In the end, college is what you make of it, so you could really and truly enjoy almost any school you apply to. That’s the big secret of the college admissions process. If you liked a school enough to apply there, in the end there’s not really that big of a difference between your first choice, and one say, four or five down on your list. So don’t feel pressured, like the college you apply to will determine the rest of your life. It’s just a school, and what you get out of it is what you put into it. You, not your college, are what will make your college experience successful, and remembering that will make the whole application process so much easier.
So to sum this all up, be smart about your college applications, plan everything out, pick where you apply wisely, and above all else, be careful about what college application advice you take!
