High School Seniors: 5 Things to Consider Before Choosing a College
**Disclaimer: I’m a Rochester student, as you may have guessed, but I’ll keep this one as unbiased as possible.**
For most high school seniors, the stressful time of simultaneously juggling applications, SATs and ACTs, and everything else that comes with applying for college, is finally winding down. Now this is the part where I’m supposed to tell you to keep working hard and not let “senioritis” get to you, but let’s all be honest with ourselves: the spring will be a time for relaxation, fun with friends before your high school career ends, and a new kind of stress: the stress of waiting for decisions from schools and then having to make a final choice. So, to help those who worry about making the “wrong” choice, I’ve put together a list of things to consider before choosing a college. Obviously, these aren’t the only things to consider, but they should help narrow the field of choices down.
1. A school’s name isn’t everything. Some of the world’s richest and most succesful people are dropouts (i.e., Bill Gates), and many more went to schools that you wouldn’t normally see at the top of college ranking lists (i.e., one of the creators of Android). College is what you make of it, and if you’re willing to work hard and maintain a positive outlook, you’ll find sucess anywhere. That’s not to say you shouldn’t aim high and hope for acceptance at your top schools, but a denial from Harvard or MIT simply closes one door and opens another that is equally filled with opportunity.
2. Distance from home matters. This one can be summed up in one statement: If you think, at any point, you’ll want to or need to come home, go to a school within three hours of your town. Don’t worry about your parents coming to visit you at random times; I have friends going to school only 45 minutes from home, and they’re just as independent as I am. Being close to home has its benefits, in terms of convenience, cost of travel, and easy access to a job you may want to keep during the school year.
3. Don’t pick a school based solely on your major. I already know eight people, who all live in my hall, who are switching majors next semester. One is going from mathematics to Latin, one from optical engineering to computer science, and another from chemistry to English. The point I’m trying to make is that your major will very likely change. So don’t choose a school solely based on the reputation of its mechanical engineering department or the quality of one of its physics professors, because college will open up your world. You will discover things you thought you’d never like, or realize that you didn’t actually like the program you initially declared yourself to be a part of.
4. Your high school friends shouldn’t be an influencing factor. As impossible as it may seem to you now, you will lose touch with some of the people you saw every day in high school. I’m only a first semester freshman, and I can think of two or three people I haven’t really talked to already. The thought may seem saddening, and you might want to prevent this by going to the same school as all of your high school friends, but the truth is that college is a time to try new and exciting things, focus on school, and jump into situations you may not be initially comfortable with. The only way to grow as an individual is to throw yourself in the “deep end.”
5. People will tell you that cost doesn’t matter: they’re wrong. Even though college loan payments may not be a part of your life for four or five years from now, when they come, they’ll hit hard. Missing payments isn’t as destructive as people make it out to be (check out this article, “How One Late Student Loan Payment Affects You“), but nonetheless, you should be forward-thinking and choose the college that offers the best combination of financial aid and what you desire academically and socially. Remember that scholarships and grants, along with any sort of merit-based aid, do not need to be paid back, while loans do.
Coming soon: The biased article (AKA “5 Things I Love about the University of Rochester“)