COLLEGE ADMISSIONS MASTERCLASS Week 2 Video 2- The Right Reasons & Considerations

All right, welcome back. Week two video two last video. We talked about the wrong things to think about when considering a college today. In this video, we're going to talk about the right reasons, what you should think about when thinking about that list. When pulling together your list of colleges, where you're going to apply, what things should you think about? And the story I tell here is this girl Karen, I worked with. She lives near my hometown in central Pennsylvania. I live near Hershey, Pennsylvania, by the way, if you like chocolate, come there. And one of the things that she was running into is that it was coming late in the day. It was coming close to May 1st. And as we all know, that's decision day, when you have to decide where you're going to go to college. And she had two schools that were on her mind. The one school was the school where her parents had always dreamed she would go. It's Penn State as a child. There's pictures of her in a onesie that says Penn State Nitley Lions on it. That all throughout her home is Penn State stuff. Both of her parents went to Penn State. A long line of generations of her family had gone to Penn State. It was just assumed she would go to Penn State, but that's not where she wanted to go. She also got into a small liberal arts college down the road that offered her smaller class sizes, which she loved. It offered her a small town setting closer to home, which she really liked. And it offered the career or the focus and the career aspirations in a particular English subject that she would really want to focus on. That was one of their strengths. And when she stepped foot on the campus, she felt at home. And the emphasis on the campus was very consistent with how she approached life. So she came to me saying, what do I do? And I said, so there's something you need to know about parents. And all parents will identify this. Parents just want their children to be happy, right? So I said that to her. Your parents just want you to be happy. So what you should do is you should tell them all the things you just told me. You should tell them where you see yourself being happy. And at the end of the day, your parents want you to be happy. Tell them how this college, although not Penn State, this college is where you see yourself being happy, where you're going to be loved, you're going to be allowed to grow into the person you want to become. And it will foster you and push you forward to the career where ultimately you see yourself going. Tell that story to them. So this was April 2020 eighth decision day was May 1st. And over that weekend, she had that conversation. And the following day, on that Monday, she sent off her acceptance letter to that small college where she wanted to go. And her parents talked to me later and said, we didn't know. Right. Don't assume that your parents know what you want just because they come to you with different ideas that you need to be in the position that to make an argument for yourself, if for anybody else, for yourself, why that particular college is where you should be, that should be where you want to focus yourself. So what are the things you should think about? Where do you want to go? Remember the mountain exercises? What mountain do you want to climb? Why do you want to climb that mountain, and how are you going to get there? Where do you want to go? Why do you want to go there? And how are you going to get there? The three base questions of the mountain exercise are the same questions that should be applied at deciding where you want to go to college and what job you want to go to, what girl you want to marry or boy you want to marry. These three questions, really, I found time and time again to be the hallmark of making a good decision. Where do you want to go? What mountain do you want to climb? Why do you want to climb that mountain? Why do you want to go there? And how are you going to reach the summit? How are you going to succeed? Where, why, and how? That if you get through those questions, you ultimately can get to the right answer for you. Okay, so we talked about the art student before. Do you have a particular academic interest that is so specialized that you need to go to a particular college? So the University of Nebraska may not have the best marine biology program in the country. If that's your love, if that's your academic interest, you may want to apply elsewhere. I make fun. But that's the reality, right? If you have a particular interest that's so specialized, that really does limit where you're going to focus your search, which could be a good thing. So thinking out of the blocks, what is the academic interest? Where you see yourself going at the end of the day? College, although about growth and making friends, is also about career advancement. Okay, so getting something from your college that allows you to push yourself forward and make yourself feel valuable and push yourself towards a meaningful career is one of the goals of college. So starting off with, do you have a particular academic interest? Is it so specialized that you need to pick your college based on that academic interest? That's the first one. The second thing Is the sister question of that, do you have a career interest that is very specialized or could only be serviced by a particular college? So academic interests that may not a particular department may not exist at some schools. And do you have a career interest that may be better served by going to another college? Right. Recognizing, again, you may not have a real good grasp of that. Undecided is the best major for a lot of people. Right. But if you do have some questions or some idea where you want to go at the end of the day, you want to think about that on the front end. The other questions you want to ask is how do you learn best? We talked about Cairn on the front end. The thought of a lecture hall with 500 students in Chemistry 101 at Penn State scared her. That's not where she wanted to be. That's not how she learned best. Do you learn best in small groups or in big lecture halls? That's a question you have to ask yourself. How do you learn best? And is that college you're thinking about conducive to that style of learning? If not, mark it off the list. Right now, trying to identify a list of colleges, you're starting out with a big pool of colleges, all the colleges in America. And these become filters as you work your way down, you start eliminating colleges that don't meet certain criteria that you have here. And at the end of the day, you're left with a small subset of the colleges in America that become your initial list of colleges that you want to then deep dive on. That's the exercise that we're doing this week. Okay, so we're starting out with all the colleges in America using different filter points to ultimately come down to the colleges that are going to be the colleges that we apply to. As we'll talk about later, the colleges you apply to are very different than the colleges you may ultimately go to. There'll be a subset, it'll be a deeper dive examination that you do in the spring. But the colleges that you're going to apply to certainly can be a larger set. And at the end of the day, you're going to come down to, as in Karen's point of view, two colleges that she was left thinking about. The other thing you need to think about, are there certain things that are important to you, like social activities or cultural activities or even religious? And are these activities on the campuses that you're thinking about going to, are there certain social, cultural, religious, or other activities that are important to you because you're doing them in high school now or you have some interest in doing them going forward now, a lot of people, if they don't have these at the campuses that are considering, will automatically eliminate those schools. One caveat. If a school has the facilities and the interests in people starting groups, that's a beautiful thing for you. To be a founder of an activity or a club or even a business in one of these areas can be a great thing for you down the line and certainly for your experience in college. So don't discount colleges simply because they don't have these. If they have the facilities and the propensity to welcome new clubs and activities and encourage people to found clubs there, okay? The caveat. So think about that thoroughly and really do your homework on that. The other thing you need to think about, the neighboring community. Okay? At some schools, the colleges are surrounded by walls. Literally looks like a castle. They're surrounded by walls with the implied, sometimes explicit point of view to the community that we don't need you, we don't want you. We're doing our thing inside our bubble. You hear about college being a bubble, that's a bubble college. Other colleges are right, the opposite. Walls do not exist, either physically, socially or otherwise. And they view themselves as being part of the neighborhood, being part of the community. They encourage the community and the students to work together on different projects, and they invite the community to be part of that community of that school. Does that matter to you? And if so, this needs to be one of your filter points. So think about that. Does that matter to you? That the colleges part of the community or not part of the community? And if so, is that a big enough determining factor to eliminate some colleges? So how it's involved in the neighboring community is one of the points. Similarly, diversity. Do you care about diversity? A lot of students do. Right? You want to be exposed to people from different backgrounds, from different cultures, from different geographies. For a lot of students, that's important. For other students, it's not important. How high does that rank on your list? Ask yourself that to determine whether or not that's going to be a limiting factor for you. And then the other question is about geography. Okay? All of these things come down to what I call my big four. Okay? We talk about this a lot, the big four. Every single one of these can be broken down into one weather, distance, size or setting. Okay? So as you look at it, geography, is it in a cold climate or warm climate? Do you need to be in Hawaii right now? I'd say I need to be in Hawaii. Do you want to be at a Colorado college? Do you love skiing, for example? Do you not care about the weather? Do you want to be where there's a whole lot of snow? So Cornell or Ithaca College might be an option for you. So weather is a lot of things. If people don't have exposure to different kinds of weather, sometimes they eliminate schools based purely on the weather. The other one's distance. Do you want to be close to home? Do you want to be far away from home? Depending on the day, that question, the answer to that question may change, right? So for a lot of people, that comes down to how accessible some of the schools are for you to get home. So if you want to get home, but you want to go far away, that is still an option for you. If you're close to some kind of like an airport, you're close to an airport. For other schools, they're really, really out into a rural setting. Dartmouth comes to mind, Right? It's difficult to get from some schools to anywhere because they're not near an airport, train station, or bus station. So distance also leads to that question of how long it takes you to get home, not just miles. Okay? The other point is size. We talked about this with the Penn State versus small college setting. How do you learn best? But also a question of, do you want to be one of many? For a lot of people who are introverts, they actually like that, right? That they are one of many and they can kind of blend in. They can blend in at the back of the lecture hall, and that's fine with them. For other people, they want that sense of community. They want to be in a small college or a small college within a bigger college. Like Karen, right? Being at a small college is where she wanted to be. She wanted that sense of community where the college class size was actually close to her high school class size. The other point is setting. Okay. I grew up in rural Kentucky. I ended up going to West Philadelphia for college, right? Had a very thick Kentucky accent. I ended up in West Philadelphia. West Philadelphia, born and raised. Yes, very. It was a culture shock for me. It was a good one for me. For other people, it's not a good one. So thinking about, do yourself see yourself in a urban setting, a city? Do you see yourself in a rural setting, further away from city, or somewhere in between? What does the setting matter to you? So all these points ultimately flow into this question of what kind of campus matter? What matters to you when it comes to the campus? Which one of these things are the ultimate deciding factor for you. And the order that I have here is just the order that I ask people these questions. For a lot of people, being close to home is the first one. And for a lot of parents, that is the first one. I want my child within 50 miles of me for many reasons. Right? And it's not a judgment, it's just the reality. A lot of parents want their children close to home. As a parent, I understand for other people, it's other things going to be the deciding factor. So this is not a ranking list for you. It's just a list of considerations that you want to think about, prioritize based on what you view as being important. And there's other things that I haven't put on this list. I one time pulled together a list of almost 100 different considerations that you want to put in to put into thought. But ultimately, I can bucket these down into what we have on this sheet of paper right here. Okay, so work through these questions, work through these considerations. Think about which one's important for you, what is not important for you. And as you look at that pool of colleges that are out there, think about which one of these are going to be the deciding factor for you. And ultimately, it may ultimately be just two or three things that you think about. But the end of the day, you're starting with always pictures of a funnel, right? So here all the colleges flow into the funnel. And here we have all these considerations, right? Here's distance from home, geography, setting size. At the end of the day, you're going to come out with the list of colleges. And this is the list of colleges that you're starting with. This is your initial college list of where you wanting to apply. And what we're going to do in the next video is that we're going to take this video or take this list and we're going to start working its way down to something that's manageable. So I'm going to talk about the resources you can use to take this list and to break it down to bring into something that's manageable for you, ultimately to a list that you feel comfortable applying to. And it pushes you forward into the next stage of your life. So that's in the next video. So go ahead, pause this one. If you need to think about these different questions, work your way through the list, and in the next video, we'll talk about the resources that will help you get to this final list here. Okay? So till next time, the next video, we'll talk about these resources.