Finding your Match

With more students opting to go to college more than ever, it is never to early to start looking at perspective colleges. There are over 1,400 colleges in the US alone, this number is extremely intimidating for many aspiring students. Thankfully they are not expected to deal with this number alone. There are many helpful resources to help students find their ideal college. Three of the most basic, but most useful sites are:

http://www.collegeboard.com/

Collegeboard is your "do it all" college site. The site is geared toward college planning, and finding the college that is right for you. This site can help you find scholarships, learn how to make payment plans, and find the college of your dreams based on an advanced college search program. One of the greatest things about collegeboard is that it asks you a series of questions pertaining to what type of college experience you would like to have. This is an extremely useful tool because it filters out all the colleges that do not fit your criteria. Once you refine your search and choose some colleges, the site gives you the academic regulations of that particular college you are looking at. This will help you determine weather or not the college is a reach school or a safety school. Collegeboard is probably the most useful site pertaining to the original search for a college. Once you have narrowed it down there are many other useful sites that can help you determine if the college is a match or not.

http://www.princetonreview.com/

The pincetonreview is one of my favorite sites because it gives you an in depth look at the colleges that interest you. Unlike collegeboard this isn't so much a college search site, but it's more like the second step once you have already found a handful of prospective colleges. The princetonreview is really descript in ranking colleges, and giving details about each college. One great detail on this site is it gives students the chance to go on the site, and write what they think about their colleges environment. Weather this response is positive or negative all depends on the student. The student write ups can really give you some incite on weather or not this is the type of environment you want. The review also has various rankings for the colleges varying from the biggest party schools, to the school that has the worst professors. Resources like this can be extremely helpful, but also a lot of fun. The princetonreview in my mind is the most detailed site out there for this second step.

http://collegebound.net/

Another useful site is collegebound. This site is a lot like the princetonreview. It gives detailed descriptions of the colleges that you are interested in. While it is basically the same as the other site, it gives you another perspective about the colleges you are looking into. One great detail about this site is that it contains all types of schooling: community colleges, tech schools, boarding schools, ect. So if you are looking for something other than your standard college than this might be the site for you.