College

Sweet Pea has been gone most of the summer working at camp which has made it hard to research colleges and find ones that will be a good fit for her. She already had two on her list, Plymouth State University (which we've already visited) and University of Maine, Farmington. Both have a program that she's interested in, are the right size, and in her preferred location. I really thought she should have more than two colleges on her "apply to" list so I spent some time looking around for her.

One place to start is the College Board website. I didn't find it very helpful in our case. I searched by major and found very few colleges, even ones that I knew had the major, even when I used the exact wording of the major at the college. Instead I decided to go to Google and see what I could find there. Jackpot! I found quite a few colleges, did a bit of research on some of them to help her make a decision if they were worth keeping on the list or not.

This morning we went through the whole list to decide if each school was a definite apply, need more info/likely apply, need more info/maybe, or a no. One came off the list, one made it to the maybe list (the location wasn't what she was looking for), and the rest were split between apply for sure and need more info/likely apply. Most of the schools are in New England, although there's one in Colorado, one in Nevada, and one in British Columbia, Canada. I think the last one is going to likely fall off the list, it's too far away and a bit...different.

We had a good discussion today. We both have more work to do. I'm going to pull together what's needed to apply and a few more important bits of information for each college and put that into a spreadsheet for her. She's going to be going back to the college websites and looking more closely at the ones she needs more information about to make a decision.

The other thing she did today was to open an account on the Common Application website since several of the schools she's got on her list use the common app. A few of the schools you can optionally use the common app or their own and I think at least one or two only use their own application.

I tell you, dealing with college applications is not for the faint of heart! We're really just at the beginning and I have a feeling we have a long way to go until next fall when she leaves home to her college of choice. Then I'll have to do this all over again with Rosie Jane, which might be more complicated if she decides to play golf in college and we have to do the NCAA paperwork to get her certified to play.