Step 1 of the college application process is... deciding where to apply to! Some of you will have already had this decided long-ago, and others will be in the process of scrounging around to find that gem of a school which has everything you've been looking for. In either case, there's a lot to consider - and even if you're in the former group, there are a lot of things to reconsider.
One of the greatest pitfalls of the application process is to blindly apply to the blanket "good schools." I want to do... something sciencey... so I'm going to apply to MIT and CalTech and Stanford and Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon and Yale and everywhere else topping the US News & World Report's ranking list! Yeah, Yale engineering... It's a problem that also plagues parents, who simply push and push their students - "Get into Berkeley, Berkeley Berkeley, go to Berkeley." without any regard for whether Berkeley (or whichever big-name dream school) fits the student, or is even a good school for what the student wants to study.
But... what's wrong with applying everywhere? It can't hurt just to send in another application, and it's always good to keep your options open. That's true, and if you're a student who doesn't really know what you want to do, and aren't really fully confident about getting into so-and-so schools, there's some merit in that. Last year, I (with perhaps a little pressure from the parents) ended up applying to quite a large number of schools, and certainly a number more than I really needed to. This did a few things: 1 is a major drain, financially. College applications for most schools run somewhere in the $50-60 range, which starts to add up when you're applying to six or seven or a dozen or so schools. 2 is the extra effort and pressure involved in doing applications, which can potentially affect the overall quality of all your applications. While this isn't so much of an issue for system-wide applications like those for UC or CSU or Common Application schools, for others it's a lot of time spent writing essays, and modifying them or writing entirely new ones to fit different prompts, and asking teachers to write recommendations for you. And given students' tendency to procrastinate, every additional application that needs to be done the weekend before is another item that needs to be squeezed in, and dilutes the overall quality of the applications. I have to admit that last year, I waited until the final few weeks to do most of my applications, all of which had the same approximate due date, and it resulted in a bit of a hectic rush at the end.
Even juggling only three applications, I felt like I could have done a much better job working on just one. That was the case later on, for my last application which had a later due date that enabled me to focus solely on it. I ended up being rejected from two out of the three of the first applications, but got accepted for the last one (all of the colleges around the same selectivity).
Of course, if you plan out and work on your apps a little bit at a time, you won't be squeezing them all in on the last weekend, and shouldn't have a problem dealing with several applications. The problem of course, is that most students will inevitably fall into that last-weekend trap, no matter the amount of prodding.
So with that aside... how to look for the right school for you. What every student needs to figure out first is... what they want to study. There's nothing wrong with being undeclared, but the last thing you want is to end up at a school based on its overall reputation or its "feel", but doesn't actually have a strong department in your major (or general area of study).
Perhaps the most important thing you can do over the summer to prepare for college applications is to decide what exactly you want to study - think about your interests, research career paths, and have a talk with your parents about what you want to do. With your area of study in mind, you can finally start narrowing down your search. There are a ton of ranking reports, US News & World Report being one of the most well-known. They're neither really comprehensive nor useful, and for the most part deal with the top-level universities, which really doesn't apply to most students. But what's important with these sources is to get names - colleges which have been regarded to have great programs for your area of study. The rankings really tell you nothing, but having a list of these names then enables you to narrow down the colleges and start doing the real in-depth research, visiting campuses, looking up information, and talking with people.
By no means all-encompassing, these are some of the resources that I found useful while going through this same search last year:
Official college website: There probably isn't any better source for objective, factual information and descriptions than the official university websites. The first stop for almost anyone should be to look at a college's website, and specifically the department or major you're intending to study, and seeing what their program offers, which usually offers a ton of information and gives you a very good idea of the kinds of things they teach and the kind of things you'll do and study. Last year, to be honest, going into applications I had virtually no interest whatsoever in UC Berkeley, probably partly due to anti-hype, some of not really knowing what to study, and a bit of being completely enamored with other schools based on general reputation. I knew I wanted to do engineering, but honestly I was clueless on exactly what kind. It wasn't until I stumbled upon the website for Berkeley's College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) and read about their program (which really stood out among the other EE and CS majors offered by other colleges) that I realized it was exactly what I wanted to do. And it wasn't until then that Berkeley became one of the universities on the top of my list, rather than just another college I was merely considering. I'm sure you'll hear the same story from a lot of other students, who finally settled on a college (or two) that they really liked, after doing some research and falling in love with a specific department and program.
Peer Discussion: You're definitely not alone in the world of college applications. There are millions of other high school seniors out there, all trying to find their dream college. There are a ton of forum boards and the like, where you can talk to other high school students, and even to college students and parents and people in the education biz who can give and share a ton of information and firsthand experience, which is just as important in assessing a college as all of the factual stuff. If you happen to know college students personally, it's a great idea to talk to them, especially if they're going to one of the colleges that you're considering, and even moreso if they're studying in the same area. A good forum resource I found (by no means the best or only) was
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/, which has a lot of good discussions, and gets frequented by a lot of knowledgeable people. Get in there, read what others know, ask your own questions, and take everything with a bit of doubt; after all, most people you'll find on the boards are just like you - and know about as much.
College blogs: One of the greatest emerging resources for students is the college blog. Written by students or even faculty or staff members, it offers a deep, firsthand insight into college life, or the admissions process. It's a more personal, first-hand and straight-up than the typical college website, and they're also more accurate and reliable than random posters on a college. Now, keep in mind this isn't college students going on about their lives over on Xanga, but real, official blogs on college websites. The best implementation of a blog system I've seen is the
MIT Undergraduate Admissions site, which features a ton of blogs from current students and admissions staff, giving a lot of helpful and honest insight on life at the school, and the way the admissions project works. It's a great way to gain a perspective on how the college is like, from the inside, and an immensely valuable behind-the-scenes resource for the admissions process.
A glaring omission that some of you may notice is "visiting the campus". In general, doing this really isn't useful - unless you're actually sitting in on the classes or staying over night in the residence halls, you don't get any feel for the academics or student life, and even then you're witnessing a small one or two-day sample of college life, which won't give you a sense of real day-to-day life. A half-day walkaround of the university gives you nothing but a first impression on the aesthetics of the architecture and the landscaping. For myself, I never set foot on any of the colleges I applied to until well after the admissions letters were mailed back, and I'm glad I didn't - it allowed me to make my decisions objectively.
These are the primary resources I've found valuable, although I'm sure there are many others out there (and feel free to let me know resources that you've found useful). For myself, I found all of the information needed and more using these resources, and if nothing else they're excellent places to start.
Hope this helps as a good starting-off guide to perhaps the most pressure-filled experiences in all of education. Keep in mind all of this is simply my own personal experience and opinion - I'm trying to assemble together some more writers and contributors, who can offer their own diverse and hopefully even contrasting views. And if you've got any feedback at all, from responses to factual inaccuracies to your own questions, post them up on the comment threads at the bottom.
Take care and spend time and consideration deciding what you're going to do (and keep your options and mind open!). In the grand scheme of college applications, and eventual college life, it's the most important thing you can possibly do.
