how to choose the best college for you: research, match your personality type, avoid regrets, +more

hey guys as a recent pandemic grad of the high school class of 2020 i've gone through exactly the struggle you're probably embarking on right now by the way this video is meant for people who are going to be attending a four-year institution in the u.s i'm not very knowledgeable about community college or schools outside the us although those are some great options as well especially if you want to save some money you can probably tell by the length of this video that i'm just going to be throwing a ton of words at you there are so many factors and pros and cons to consider you don't have to weigh everything i say equally or even care about it at all i just want to throw a bunch of different possibilities at you and you can try on these hats see what resonates the most with you and use that to help you find the right direction by the way i also made a spreadsheet template you can use to organize your research and make this whole video easier to follow so check out the link in the description this segment of the video is sponsored by paperlike paperlake makes ipad screen protectors and these are one of my favorite companion tools for note taking the paper like screen protector has a matte texture that imitates the feeling of writing on a real paper and this allows you to have more control and therefore neater handwriting compared to just using the slippery glass screen unlike a lot of the dupes it has a truly smooth matte texture i don't know if that makes any sense but basically it's not sandpapery unlike a lot of the dupes i've tried and therefore it won't damage your apple pencil tip if this sounds cool to you check out the link in the description and get your own paper like screen protector alright and now let's get back to the main video [Music] first thing to consider probably the most important deal breaker part to consider is the cost i'm a firm believer that education is a wonderful experience and not just something you do for the economic value of it but we do have to acknowledge that unless you're a trust fund baby at the end of the day college is freaking expensive and keep in mind that college degree earners do earn on average about a million dollars more than those with only high school diplomas over their entire lifetime so it tends to be a good investment but it's not necessarily worth it to pay that extra when the four-year experience and the economic value you get out of the degree might ultimately end up being the same between various options if you know that a school is just hopelessly out of your budget like there is no possible way you're gonna get enough scholarships or negotiate out enough financial aid to go there don't bother researching it don't bother finding out how perfect and awesome it is and just breaking your own heart stop it get some help with that in mind here are a few things to look out for when you end up calculating your true cost of college first of all read everything in your financial aid package and do not count your loans as part of your discount like sure the school might put on the bottom line that your total cost is zero but if your tuition is twenty thousand dollars a year and you get ten thousand dollars a year in grants which is money that you're just given that you don't need to pay back and you get the rest in loans the cost is still 10 000 a year because even if you're not paying that 10 000 immediately while you're in school you'll still end up having to pay it later and you honestly might just end up paying more than that anyways because of interest rates my next tip that apparently not that many people know about is that you can negotiate your financial aid offer if you are absolutely in love with one school but you have a way lower tuition costs at another similar school and the price is the only thing that's holding you back from attending that first school that you really love just email their financial aid office or their scholarship office and tell them hey i have this offer from another school and please can you match it because i want to go to your school and usually if they want to keep you as a student they'll just uh offer that price match you know like when you go to best buy and you're like hey that store down the street is selling this laptop for 100 less they'll give you the discount sometimes mostly keep in mind though this is only for like schools of a similar tier like if you got into i don't know harvard and like community college harvard is not going to price match community college but that's pretty much all of the general advice i can really give you the economic calculations of whether a particular school will really be worth that extra cost or not is really up to you and anybody who is helping you pay tuition [Music] the second factor i want to discuss is the size of the school because this has a huge influence on how you'll experience both the social and academic slash career dimensions of your education and by the way in this segment i'm sort of picking two sides of small school versus big school but i mean i guess technically the school population is a discrete measure because you can't have decimals anyways the population of a school usually exists on a spectrum there just tend to be more schools clustered on the small end and the big end of the spectrum this dichotomy that i'm forcing is between the small liberal arts college vibe and the big public university buy but again there's a lot that falls in between and there's a lot of diversity between those two groups as well god what kind of dance is this you know just gonna be dropping this move during our virtual zoom prom i never got from this is one of the easiest things to find by just googling what is the undergraduate population at insert university here keep in mind though you have to make sure to specify the undergraduate population and not the entire student body because grad students are like birds they they don't exist they're a plot from the government once you get this number it's time to categorize that school into these small large medium buckets small is anything you consider to be a high school size and keep in mind that apparently some high school in like texas can get up to 5 000 people in large schools anything you'd look at that population and say that could be a small town somewhere in the tens of thousands or even higher and a medium is just anything that's sort of in between there the number of students has a pretty big influence on the general like feeling and access to resources of being at that school and so first we're going to talk about the social dimension basically the vibes are big schools like a big city and a small school is like a small town i've noticed a lot of websites say like introverted versus extroverted is the whole difference but i disagree some introverts like me really love big cities because i really love the anonymity of just being in a huge crowd whereas some extroverts also like big cities because there's a lot of potential opportunities and stimuli to explore but then some introverts like small towns because they're cozy and there's not that many people and some extroverts like small towns because you can really get to know everyone and form a community another dimension to consider is whether you had a hard time making friends in high school but again there's diversity and nuance within the loser people like me and the non-loser people as well if you found it hard to make friends in high school because people thought you were weird because you had niche interests or you just didn't really fit in maybe consider a bigger school there tends to be less clickiness and there's a lot more people there you know you got a larger sample size so it's more likely for you to find people who you really fit in with on the other hand if you found it hard to make friends because you were shy maybe consider a smaller school instead i mean this is where i'd categorize myself i'm just not very good at reaching out to people and i do struggle a bit to make friends at my larger school i go to ucla if you didn't know because kind of natural way i made friends in high school was just seeing the same people again and again in my extracurriculars or my classes and at a super large school it's pretty statistically unlikely to see the same people again and again and so you really have to take initiative in meeting people but for introverts it can be kind of hard so having a small school can help you foster that seeing the same people over and over atmosphere if you're an extrovert first of all um i'm jealous second of all the pandemic sure sucks for you doesn't it and third of all it makes it easier for you to thrive in pretty much any social environment if you like parties i would say a big school is better for you not only because they're just more people and therefore a higher probability of encountering a party but also because small schools also tend to be a lot more academically oriented than bigger state schools and speaking of academics the size of your school also tends to have a huge impact on the academic experience and the range of career and research and academic opportunities both small and large schools are great options to get what academic and career opportunities you want out of your undergraduate experience but there are pros and cons to each at a small school it's definitely easier to get individual attention from your professors and from your academic counselors since you know they just have a smaller student body to serve although somehow my 2000 person high school managed to not serve any of us but that's public school for you i guess it's also somewhat easier to stand out and get those opportunities not that people are less competitive but just that the playing field is smaller and therefore the competition's a bit less fierce there are also smaller class sizes which don't get me wrong big schools like ucla do have smaller seminar style classes it's just there are a lot fewer of them and when you do have big lecture classes like my intro big lecture classes are 300 to 400 people whereas my friend who goes to a small liberal arts school has large classes with 50 to 100 people so if you feel like getting individual attention during class or having a lot more opportunities to have discussions with your professor and classmates is important to you maybe look into a smaller school but you know big schools have their pros too and the main one is that since it's so big there are just more resources and opportunities available at the school the organizations tend to be better since they have a bigger field of talent to draw from if you know you have a very specific niche you want to get into there are probably going to be a wider range of organizations that fit your interests at a bigger school and for your academic interests there tend to be a wider range of potential classes to take and majors to get into again going back to that big city analogy a big city just has so much going for it but since there are so many people there the competition's a little steeper and it may be harder to get these amazing resources that are available and speaking from personal experience you tend to go from being the top dog smart student at your high school to being a little baby fish in a gigantic pond and if you have a bit of fragile gifted kid self-esteem prepare to be knocked down a peg or two because trust me there is always somebody smarter and better than you on campus so you can't have that much ego if you want to succeed in this environment additionally since the ratio of students per academic advisor is just a little higher at most big schools it's not the greatest fit for you if you'd like a little bit more hand-holding or individual accountability being placed on you from outside you really have to be pretty independent and like a self-starter but again the opportunities are amazing if you just are the right type of person who can take advantage of them next category to discuss is student life yes education is important but you're also going to be living here for four years think about who you were four years ago when you were a freshman in high school yeah that feels long ago didn't it who even was that person and that freshman stupid knew nothing now think about where you are now and think about where you'll be four years from now this college is the place where you're gonna have to learn all of that and be able to tolerate being alive for four of the most academically demanding years of your life it is important that you can be happy here and unless you are a robot who can subsist only on the intellectual joys of learning student life does become an important factor this is a little bit harder to accurately gauge because it would be like trying to ask one person at your high school to tell you everything about what the high school is like no one knows everything and everyone is colored by their own individual experiences so i recommend getting information from current students and asking as many people as you possibly can in order to get a maximally accurate portrait of the school it's like trying to get an accurate survey of a population you want to increase your sample size as much as possible in order to make sure it is a representative sample oh god it's been too long since i took stats oh god how did i get a five on this ap test i don't remember anything but yeah in order to find these students you can ask people that you already know like your high school alumni or maybe older siblings older siblings friends just reach out to your network there are also a lot of great places to look online one i recommend is if the school has a facebook group dedicated to memes that's a pretty good source some schools also have student-run meme accounts most student organizations will also have an instagram page that is rather active so you can just dm the student organizations especially for the organizations that you might want to join because that is run by a real person who can tell you about their experiences additionally try the reddit forum for a pretty brutally honest anonymous look at the school if you're going to post in a subreddit or a facebook group though make sure you check the group's policy about what you can post to avoid spamming or clogging up their feed with a bunch of content that is not allowed besides helping you get in contact with current students the means and posts on these pages can also give you a better idea of what the school community is like what it feels like to be there as i kind of brushed up on earlier though just remember that the memes and reddit posts tend to focus a lot more on the negative things just like the rest of the internet mostly so don't get completely turned off that students are complaining about being stressed and how the cafeteria food sucks because like that's just how school is sometimes except not at ucla we're super stressed but the dining hall food is fantastic however if you do notice that something is super commonly complained about and it's not just like oh school is hard take that into consideration for sure as a flaw of the school like i know that people at uw complain a lot about just how brutal the grading curves are and one of my friends who goes there is like yeah that's that's pretty accurate something i wish i knew before deciding to go there like not that i have anything against u-dub it's just sometimes if everyone complains about the same thing it's probably a major negative that might weigh on you if you decide to go there now then i've rambled on and on about where to find people to ask about this information let's actually talk about what you want to ask about you might also just know about like popular mythology of certain schools or maybe that's just a bay area obsessed with college admissions thing like people say that uc san diego is uc socially dead or that uci is a bunch of abgs who like boba stereotypes are stereotypes they're not always true about every single person at that school but at the same time they exist for a reason you know maybe the stereotype is describing something that's partially true or maybe it's just that once the myth perpetuates itself for long enough people who want to be part of that stereotype will tend to choose that school and create that type of community but of course it's never true about everyone so make sure you just get the first hand experience of actual students other character traits of a school to ask about not that a school is a person but i don't know it seems like i could kind of treat them as people with the way we talk about getting rejected by them but anyways other things to ask about what major or category of majors are considered the most popular or talked about for instance some schools are very heavily pre-med other schools are very heavily business also maybe ask about the most active and prominent student organizations for instance uc irvine is pretty known for having a lot of dance teams whereas some schools are dominated by greek life which by the way if you don't know that just means sororities and fraternities they're called greek life because they have like greek letters and stuff i don't really know actually why they're called greek life they don't seem to have any relation to the country of greece but that's the u.s for you maybe also ask about what type of daily routine is considered normal or perhaps most desirable for instance if you ask a ucla student most of them would probably tell you that most students here are kind of workaholic we all try to take 20 million units and do five extracurriculars so that can be a pretty good gauge of what the school culture and what the student body's priorities as a whole tend to be one aspect of student life to really consider looking into if you are marginalized in any aspect of your identity is the safety and support available for your particular marginalized identity first of all take the surrounding city into account although most universities are pretty liberal one the surrounding culture does influence people inside the university and you do have to leave your university campus sometimes and no one wants to get hate-crimed at safeway now we're all adults here and we know that usually the more conservative an area is the more likely for various isms to run amok and so you'll probably want to check voting maps to make sure that it is in fact a city or region that is safe for you but of course that doesn't indicate everything some conservative areas are pretty safe and welcoming and some liberal areas are not so much but of course that's not a perfect indicator so make sure you also just reach out to current students and ask them how they feel ask a student who shares your marginalized identities and ask them whether they feel supported by the school and safe in the city surrounding area if you're struggling to find more information about this check out these student groups that are dedicated to your marginalized blah blah i can't say words anymore marginalized identities so if you can find those groups websites and dm them on instagram or facebook that's a great way to get in contact with people and ask about what's available there a lot of schools also do have residential communities so maybe a specific floor or building that is dedicated to certain identity groups and lastly if you have disabilities you can contact the school's disability office or check their website for their disability office in order to see what sorts of accommodations can be made available to you and if you have limited mobility to do your disability i would recommend going on a campus tour virtually if you can't get on the actual campus and evaluate how accessible the campus would be for you for instance i don't have the lived experience of being on wheels but if you are it's probably pretty hard to get around the ucla campus because it's quite hilly and most of the major paths are constructed with stairs next let's look at academics and majors and i think a definite deal breaker should be if they don't have the major that interests you if you're pretty much 100 on a narrow or uncommon career field and not many schools have that major make sure that is your number one priority but if you're like most people and you're not 100 sure what you're doing or a variety of majors can work for your career field make a list of all of the ones that interest you and try to look for a school that has all of them since you know you don't want to limit your options but of course unless you're going to a massive school that has hundreds of majors it's unlikely that your school will have everything that you want and so a couple of compromises to consider looking into are double majoring or having a major and minor combination that works for your career field if you cannot complete the step because you have no idea what you want your major to be maybe go to community college first so that you can explore your interests and complete some general education requirements without spending a ton of money on a four-year university additionally besides just making sure they have your major here are another couple of factors to look into in helping you make your decision one is to check the general education requirements for the entire college the number of requirements whether they accept ap credits community college classes even sat scores or anything else you've already done if you find that you've completed a ton of them already that's fantastic especially if you want to graduate sooner than four years or double major it helps to have a lot of these things out of the way already additionally the programs for certain majors also vary widely by school so actually look at the required courses and the elective courses within the major for instance when i was researching i found that some schools communications majors had a very journalism training focus whereas i really liked ucla's communications major because it was more focused on an interdisciplinary social sciences approach really look into programs and figure out what you want to get what classes you actually want to take what things you actually want to learn about lastly a question i've been asked sometimes is whether it matters whether the school is known to be good for your major usually you can find the you know top schools for chemistry top schools for history in niche and princeton review and other ranking sites now the thing to know about these rankings is that they tend to be more based on faculty research output and overall the prestige of the research department within that school rather than how good they are at teaching undergraduate students unless you want to go for a phd or be a researcher after your undergraduate experience these rankings don't really affect your quality of education another exception is within certain career fields there are these things called target schools which usually are the uber prestigious ivy league level type of schools i'll be talking more about this in the next section of the video but unless those two cases apply to you and your career interests doesn't really matter whether your school is good for your major our next category is prestige and this is an easier category to google since you can just go on college ranking sites i know a lot of people go on u.s news there's niche.com there's princeton review you can just google rankings of colleges 2021 don't forget though if you're considering a liberal arts college they tend to be on a completely different web page than the things called national universities because they're like technically a different type of school but yeah if any ranking places the schools that are on your list into the top 20 or 25 it's considered very highly prestigious if a school is considered this prestigious that's usually the only case in which i'd say that the name recognition level of the school actually matters otherwise i don't think it plays a major factor in the economic value of your degree and at every school within like the top 50. they can all be trusted to have some pretty excellent quality education and regional recognition with employers and some are under recognized schools really do have a lot of regional influence or career field influence and a quality education overall so don't stress out too much about prestige honestly the prestige of your school really doesn't matter that much on your life outcomes getting in is more of an indicator of potential of having been a hard worker rather than a direct proponent to success and also you can like work super hard and be super smart and still not get into elite schools these days because of how competitive the field is for instance i remember hearing about a study a while ago that students who get into ultra prestigious schools but decide not to go and instead go to a lower ranked university end up having similar success outcomes as those who do end up choosing to go to a prestigious school so opportunities are everywhere you don't have to go to a brand name school to get them for most people prestige is pretty much a zero or one in importance scale but there are a couple of exceptions one is if you are first generation low-income or minority student having that prestigious name and connections that are made there become a bigger deal in validating you because you kind of need it make you seem more legit if you come from a historically marginalized background i know it sounds mean to say but that's just kind of how america is additionally there are certain career fields like consulting and doing finance on wall street that have these things called target schools which are the highly highly prestigious schools that they heavily recruit from so if you want to go into those fields the prestige of your undergraduate education becomes a lot more important i'm sure there are also other career fields that have exceptions so if you're pretty sure of what you want to do after you graduate from college just ask a couple of people who already work in that field and get their opinions on whether you know prestige actually matters [Music] i've been talking to myself for like an hour and a half so let's just get on to the last factor we want to discuss which is location and i have two categories within location which are absolute location you know just the actual literal city and state where it is on a map and the relative location which is the type of city setting first let's talk about absolute location and one thing you want to think about is whether it's in or out of state if it's a public school private schools usually have the same tuition for in-state and out-of-state students but public schools if you are from the state that funds that school you'll usually have a significantly lower tuition cost but you know you probably already thought about this in the cost category that we discussed at the beginning of the video the next thing to think about is the distance of the school from your home so you can just go on google maps and measure the distance from your hometown to where your college is it's important to actually do this measuring thing to figure out the amount of distance and travel time between the two locations one being in state doesn't mean you're closer because a lot of schools in nevada are closer to my hometown in california than los angeles is secondly you actually have to take into account the travel time and convenience not just the literal distance closer doesn't always equal more convenient if i wanted to get from my school in la to the university of washington it's a three-hour plane ride and then around 30 minutes on a car whereas if i wanted to get from los angeles to uc davis it's significantly closer because it's in northern california instead of washington but it's an hour and a half on a plane and then over two hours of driving distance from home does also become a major financial and time and effort consideration if you can't drive yourself from your home to your school you will either have to buy a bunch of new stuff at your college location in order to stock your room and like not sleep on a bare mattress or pay to ship everything back and forth whenever you go home besides the financial and like convenience considerations it also depends on your personal feelings and personal independence from your family and this isn't really a matter of should i go far from home versus should i stay close to home it's more of a should i consider staying close to home as an important factor or should i not care at all about whether i'm close to home it's all still a balancing act you know some locations might be worth going far away depending on what you find important and we'll talk about that next soon another fact to consider is whether you'll be homesick if you know that you deal with super super severe homesickness and you just can't bear to be far away then uh maybe don't cause yourself that much emotional distress for four years however if you've never had a summer camp experience or just like been away from your family with a bunch of strangers for over two weeks it's hard to know how you'll react and in this case i would tend to just say assume you'll be fine most people will eventually survive homesickness and get over it and learn how to do laundry so i wouldn't let this take a firm hold on how you make your college decisions if you don't have any compelling pressing reason to make it a reason did that make any sense besides just like how far do you want to be from home you also want to consider the actual city itself which is a motivating reason for being far away from home if necessary and i think the major consideration should be whether the region has a lot of opportunities for your desired career field for instance if you want to work in film la is probably the place to be and if you want to work in tech the bay area is a great place to go i mean both of these industries do have like a thriving scene outside of these major hubs but it is nice to be in the center of it all do keep in mind though that most jobs aren't regionally specific and especially they're not originally specific to these very very high cost of living areas so again if you don't have a super compelling reason to be in a location don't let it play a significant factor last but not least weather oh boy i did not think about weather until i went to the east coast for like two weeks in the winter and froze my little californian booty off but whether it does have a significant effect on your day-to-day mood and it also affects what activities you can do like if you like to ski don't live in los angeles another dimension of location you want to think about and research is the city setting which i'm going to call relative location this is whether you're living in downtown or on the edges of the city or in a suburb or just in a rural area kind of in the middle of nowhere consider what local resources are available nearby you know things like stores and libraries and museums and whatever local things you think are important also look up the safety of the neighborhood and the safety of the campus overall a lot of virtual campus tours tend to have answers to you know how does the campus manage security how do the dorm buildings stay safe and prevent you from getting stabbed to death in your sleep not that that's a huge issue on college campuses additionally you can google and check news sources for crime statistics and the general reputation of the neighborhood also look into how easy it is to get around the campus and the surrounding area for instance i've heard that at stanford it's a big campus that is pretty bikable so pretty much everyone gets around by bike whereas ucla is very hilly and pretty compact so it's mostly a walking campus when you research the surrounding city you'll also get a better idea of whether you'll need a car or you'll be able to take public transit which are some pretty important financial considerations related to financial considerations look into renting in the surrounding area most college campus areas just have incredibly high costs of living because supply and demand is kind of goofed but especially in major cities like los angeles rent is unreasonable and i hate it anyways i feel like i've been talking for way too long and i might be starting to go a little bit loopy but if you have any questions you'd like me to clarify please do leave those in the comments and i'll try my best to get back to you hopefully someone else in the comments be a little helpful but now that you've researched and considered all these factors and thought about what your personal interests and personality traits match best with it's time to do the elimination round once you've filled in my organizing spreadsheet which i've linked in the description it's completely free for you focus on the deal breaker negative aspects if anything that you've ranked as a four or five and how important it is to you is missing out of school that school probably wouldn't end up being the greatest fit for you or if it's missing a lot of things that you consider to be three or higher that's a pretty bad sign as well and i would consider taking that off your list at this point you're probably left with two three schools that seem to have it all like at this point they don't have that many negatives it's just a matter of which school has the best positives and this is the hardest part oh my god it is so so hard it's really up to you to decide what you like and who you are which is so existential and really a tough challenge to ask of us and one thing i've definitely regretted upon reflecting is that i kind of just decided i don't know who i am so i'm just not going to like let that play a factor in my decision at all that's not wise even if you're not 100 sure of who you want to be and what you like the most at least make your best guess and then decide based on that best guess it's kind of like how on a multiple choice test it's better to give your best guess than to not answer the question at all again i know it's so so hard to make this kind of choice and here are a few little tidbits that might help you as they were helpful to me and to some of my friends first know that if this is a hard choice that's a great sign because if it's hard to choose it means they're both good options and quite similar in how good they are like if one of them was clearly a worse and almost bad choice it would be an easy decision but it's not which means you have two really good options so you can't ever end up really being that wrong right because they're both good another thing to try is just flipping a coin and trusting your gut instinct if you flip that coin and it lands on your answer and you feel disappointed it means you should pick the other choice if you feel relieved and happy it means that's the one you should go with and if you really don't feel either which way at all well at least you've made a temporary decision and it's always possible to go back before you submit your letter of intent to register lastly a mental exercise to try is to ask yourself which choice will result in the least regrets like let's say you picked school a once you're attending there what might you be thinking about that you might have missed out on at school b what types of what ifs and the one that got away type thoughts would fill your head about each school if you feel like you would have way more regrets about choosing one school over the other then that can be a pretty good indicator to you that was a lot of information and i hope you found some of it helpful i upload new videos about student life and college on this channel every week and you can visit my instagram my tech talk and my second channel for some sometimes study related content see you next time

Channel: studyquill

Views: 106,759

Rating: 4.9807024 out of 5

Keywords: studying, college, school

Id: iv4qWu_8sh0

Length: 34min 32sec (2072 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021