The College Search 

 A little over a year ago I was applying to colleges, and though it seems like ages and ages ago due to graduating, moving, and coronavirus, I still remember how I went about it.  When I was a junior, I started looking at a bunch of different colleges, and I had no idea where I wanted to go, they ranged all over the map from California to Georgia to Colorado to Chicago, and this is how I narrowed down my list.

First, one of the best tools I was able to use was the College Board College Search function on their website.  The College Search function is really great because not only can you narrow down what you want in a school, when you click on the school it’ll tell you everything that you could ever need to know about the school as well.  When starting to use this, I came up with what I thought were my basic needs in a school, medium-large, urban, majors I was interested in, etc. and that was the basic outline of what schools would potentially work for me.

Unfortunately there were still so many schools, and from there I selected more specific details I wanted in a school, and I changed some and I tweaked with it until I found five schools that I thought would fit me best, and I started visiting them and applying to them.  I was also getting a constant flow of mail from colleges that I had never heard of and looking them up on there really helped me learn more about each school, and that’s actually how I found out about DePaul.

Another really great thing that I did while looking for colleges was visiting them.  Luckily, I visited all of the colleges I wanted to apply to before coronavirus happened, and in doing that I learned so much more about the schools.  Being able to go to the campus and see what their environment is like is really great, and helps you get a feel for the school and how you think you may do there.  Since I didn’t really have a super clear idea of what I wanted to do, all of the schools I was looking at had good programs for everything in general, and they had a lot of different majors, so when I did decide I had a lot to choose from.

Going in undecided was nerve wracking from time to time but seeing all of the schools that had exploratory programs and current students telling me that they had switched their majors’ multiple times, I felt much better.  Searching for colleges overall was fun though, I got to look at all of these cool schools and choose where I wanted to go, seeing what different places had to offer and being able to make sure it worked the best for me was amazing.   

– Madeline Zawada