The Million Dollar Question: Where are you going to college?

By Grecia Gonzalez

I’m going to Harvard, but in all honesty I was never the weird five year old who ran around screaming that. In fact, I didn’t realize that Harvard was the place for me until I went to summer school there last year. And you know what? That’s totally normal. Despite the fact that you’ll run into dozens of classmates that will tell you that their life goal is to go to X College, the reality is that they may only be saying that to look cool or they really don’t know. And it’s okay to not know. What matters is eventually figuring it out, and there is a way to go about doing that.

You’ll find that college searching ironically requires an odd amount of soul searching. I’m not saying this to be clichéd; it’s mostly true. When you’re looking for a school it’s important that you understand what kind of person you are and what it is that you want out of college. Are you comfortable with lots of people or do you prefer a smaller, closer-knit community? Do you want a more practical hands-on education, or is your passion theory? Do you want to live far away from home or close by? All of these questions and more have different answers for different people, but they’re not impossible to answer. In fact, when you break down college in terms of simple questions, the actual decision isn’t hard.

When I started thinking about college my junior year (and this is kind of bad of me since it’s usually better to do this earlier) I had already started constructing an idea of what kind of college I wanted to attend. I wanted a college with a strong foundation and emphasis in theory and plenty of research opportunities. I wanted to explore life out of California (i.e., go to school on the East Coast), but I wasn’t opposed to staying if my options where better in my state. Needless to say, this gave me a ridiculously large selection of schools. So, how did I narrow it down?

Your pool of college applications should follow the policy of “Safe, Middle, Reach.” What that phrase means is that the schools you apply to should fall into the different categories of “safety” school, “middle” school, or “reach” school. You should apply to “safety schools,” or schools that you know will accept you given your past and current performance (and that might even accept you if you for some reason succumb to the terrible ailment of Senioritis – though I strongly urge against you contracting it). You should also apply to schools that are slightly more competitive but that would still be within your range of college attractiveness (e.g., grades and extracurricular activities). These “middle schools” are ones that you should expect to get into if you keep up good to excellent work, but definitely have more presence than your safety schools. Finally, you should apply to “reach schools,” or schools that technically might be beyond your level or what you perceive to be your level. These are schools like, but not exclusively, Ivies. Now, you might be afraid to apply to these schools because you might think that you don’t stand a chance, but don’t be so pessimistic. Remember, the worst a reach school can do is reject you. Don’t reject yourself before they do. They know who can cut it at their schools, so if they do accept you, don’t be afraid to go. They want you for a reason.

However, by far the most important piece of advice for applying to schools is this: apply only to schools that you would be happy to go to if they accepted you. You’ll find that if you do this after you construct your “Safe, Middle, Reach” list, you’ll easily be able to manage the applications for the coming year. Remember, it’s important to narrow down the list to a manageable number so that actually applying to them and keeping up with their paperwork and specific needs doesn’t leave you with any permanent trauma. No need to kill your desire for college before you even get there, right?