Here’s how I conducted my college search, and I think the process worked well.
1) Decide what general discipline I wanted to get into. (Engineering). If the school is large and has other programs, that could be of benefit if you’re not sure what you want to pursue.
2) Find a list of the best [engineering] schools in the US and write down the top 25, to use as a rough measure of degree recognition and prestige.
3) Use sites like studentsreview.com to rank these schools by factors such as % of graduates who would return, perceived quality of education, and expected earnings after graduation, as well as softer factors such as campus social life, weather, and attractiveness of student body (or whatever floats your boat, but these softer factors are important, as you’ll be spending 4 years of your life there). If you’re looking for a data-driven approach, this site is great because it slices the data a lot and lets you weight different factors by importance. I also used colleges.niche.com to get more student reviews.
4) Take the top 10 schools after this filtering process, visit as many as you can, and apply to all of them.
Hindsight bias notwithstanding, I’m very happy with where I ended up both in terms of career trajectory and enjoyment of the college experience, as compared to a naive sample of my high school friends.
Here’s how I conducted my college search, and I think the process worked well.
1) Decide what general discipline I wanted to get into. (Engineering). If the school is large and has other programs, that could be of benefit if you’re not sure what you want to pursue.
2) Find a list of the best [engineering] schools in the US and write down the top 25, to use as a rough measure of degree recognition and prestige.
3) Use sites like studentsreview.com to rank these schools by factors such as % of graduates who would return, perceived quality of education, and expected earnings after graduation, as well as softer factors such as campus social life, weather, and attractiveness of student body (or whatever floats your boat, but these softer factors are important, as you’ll be spending 4 years of your life there). If you’re looking for a data-driven approach, this site is great because it slices the data a lot and lets you weight different factors by importance. I also used colleges.niche.com to get more student reviews.
4) Take the top 10 schools after this filtering process, visit as many as you can, and apply to all of them.
Hindsight bias notwithstanding, I’m very happy with where I ended up both in terms of career trajectory and enjoyment of the college experience, as compared to a naive sample of my high school friends.