How To: Start the College Process

Looking into colleges but don't know where to start? Here is a good place, speaking from the experience I have gained and the knowledge from others: 

1. Chose a Major

    a. Chose what you enjoy doing and find your top two talents. Where they meet is what you would enjoy doing as a job, and something you are good at. This means you get paid to do something that you may have been willing to do for free. 

    b. Once you have that taken care of, you might want to learn what the major is called if you were to go to college to learn how to perform the job best. 

2. Search colleges that offer this Major

    a. Some people already know what college they want to go to, so they can skip this step 

    b. On the other hand, some do not. If you are open to whatever college- private, public, in-state, or out of state, then I would recommend Google Searching it. If you have more specific qualifications to your dream college or one you would like to go to, that needs to be specified in the search. 

3. Apply to the College

This should be assumed. Once you have come up with a college that you are happy with, you should tell them that you are interested in attending that college. You will have to fill out a form with a lot of personal information, and oftentimes you have to write an essay or something to give them something to 'grade' to see if they want to accept you. Apparently, if a college can't accept a good amount of you, showing genuine interest in the college will make them want to accept you because they want a better turnover- they want the most amount of those accepted to actually chose to come. So, that is important to understand: you don't have to go to the college you applied to and you can apply to as many colleges as you want to. 

4. Scholarships 

Some people will dive into this before they even apply to colleges and this is fine. I did not do so and I think I will still be okay. You should first look at an application to the scholarships that the college offers but always look at other sites. Scholarships.com, or now College Board or so many other sites help you apply to many scholarships easily. 

5. Wait 

This will probably take time. You need to be patient. If it seems to take too long, you could probably email or call the college about it, which show s that you were interested. Don't panic if it takes time. 

Once you are accepted, there will be people there who can tell you what your next steps are. This varies too much between colleges, so I will not go into detail about what my college is telling me to do here now.