Too Many Colleges, Too Little Time

                I'm a junior this year which means I am expected to start taking my college exams and applying for colleges. I guess if you really wanted to, you could save the application process for the beginning of senior year but that’s kind of pushing it. It is so amazing how fast time flies and how quickly the time of apply for college has come up. As soon as you get to this point, you start asking "What college do I want to go to?" The big and well-known ones like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc., are obvious choices I guess but if you don't have the grades or brains or want to go to any of these you have to find one college out of the thousands out there.

                When you take the test preps for the actual tests (like the PSAT and the PLAN tests) you fill out your information (your address, e-mail, phone number, etc). You are then given the choice to receive information from colleges. I decided to choose this because I thought it would be a good way to learn about the colleges. I assume it would be, but the colleges send you SOOOO much information that there is just too much to sort through.

                For all of the big environmental people out there, telling colleges to send emails instead of mail would save like a million trees. I guess mail is sort of a better method because I open all of my mail, and basically none of my emails but in the past two years I must have gotten at least ten college flyers per WEEK. That is just ridiculous. I get about twenty five emails per week, of which I really don't open but still! My advice to those colleges would be to find a good slogan, plaster all over, and make yourself known in a different way than other colleges because it just is not working.

                College fairs are another way to learn about colleges but from my one experience, there are soo many. It is also kind of awkward if you go up to the table and can't answer what you're looking for in a college or what major you're going into.  I felt like they also didn't know what to say, of course when I asked they gave me their generic speech and I took a flyer and left but honestly I don't think I benefited from more than ten percent of the things there. (419)