about athletic divisions or extracurriculars, mental health resources, scholarships, or need-blind financial aid. You can also consider guaranteed housing policies, the resi- dential system, work-study opportunities, and so on. Don’t forget to add these categories to your college search list! Details are important and can give you insight into each school’s values and if they align with your own, helping you find a great fit for you. Including specific information will also allow you to compare each school and their offerings to narrow down your list to a group of institutions you would feel joyful to receive an acceptance letter from. Keep in mind, your ideal choices or factors to consider will vary from your peers, but this is your list. Don’t feel pressured to pick schools you don’t actually want to attend. You’ll spend hours (and a lot of money) on your applications for each school, so you want to make sure you’re truly inter- ested in attending.
Keep track of deadlines Lastly, create and maintain a separate document and calendar to add important dates and deadlines you don’t want to forget. For starters, look at your finished list and find the date that college essay prompts come out and what the application deadline is for each school, including Early Decision, Early Action, and Regular Decision. If you’re early in the process, feel free to include details about information sessions, campus tours, college fairs, advisor meetings, and more. Having a visual of important dates to keep in mind will help you with time management in the long run.
Hopefully this advice will allow you to stay organized while finding the best colleges suited for you. A little organization now will help you a lot later. Good luck!
Pilar Zapata Thompson is a CollegeXpress Student Writer from Chile.
College Search Spreadsheet Template Get organized with your very own
Here’s the college search spreadsheet you need to keep all your admission and application info organized! Download our free resource now.
College search spreadsheets are magical. They let you keep track of all your college info and compare it easily. With tools like Google Drive and Dropbox, you can access your spreadsheets anytime on your phone and laptop. You can even color-code the fields if you want to get really wild. We tell students to make a spreadsheet for their college search all the time (it comes up three times in our Ultimate Guide to the College Search alone!). But after we looked online and saw there weren’t many sample college search spreadsheets out there, we decided we needed to take matters into our own hands. You can download and use this document as is or make it your own with all the college search criteria that’s important to you.
Note: This is our example template, so we can’t grant you access to edit this specific document. But you can download the Google Sheets file to your computer to make your own personal copy, copy and paste the fields in a new document, or just look at it for inspiration. Click the image to view the Google Doc!
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