So I will be graduating from high school pretty soon and then will be off to college. Now there are some keys things I wish I looked into and I’m here to share this info with you.
1.) Find out how much FAFSA will give you. Now, if you’re like me, you’re parents seem to make a lot of money but you are paying for college yourself. So at first, you think oh shit I’m screwed but not necessarily. My expected family contribution (EFC) was way less than what I expected. Now there are websites out there and they can help you estimate your EFC. This is important to do because when you have a better idea of how much financial aid you can get, it opens up a lot of doors to different colleges you never thought you could afford. On the flip side, if you think your EFC will be low and you get your hopes up and get set on a school then you realize you can’t afford it you get your heart broken. If I were doing this process again I would do it either sophomore or junior year. I say this because its not a good idea to start thinking where you want to go fall of senior year. Trust me.
2.) Take the SAT as many times as you want! One of my biggest regrets is not taking it one more time to see if I could get a higher score to get in the Honors Program at the school I’m looking at. If you feel like you won’t improve, then I would say don’t take it but if you genuinely think you can do better, take it again. Don’t be afraid that you’ll look silly to the colleges if you take it more than 2 times, what seems to be average. Also, answer those silly questions they send you everyday on your email. I think answering those questions so diligently is what made my score jump from the first of 1580 to 1780. Also, another sign for you to take the SAT again is when there is such a huge jump in the scores between the first time and the second time. It’s not always a clear indicator you can get a better score but when it kind of us hanging around the same the general area of score, that means that you probably got as high as you could. Unless, you think you can do better which we already went over.
3.) Keep a calendar of everything you’ll need to know. You have to stay on top of a lot of things. And when you miss out on that scholarship or anything of the sort you’ll be kicking yourself. I just got Google Calendar. Its really easy. And start this beginning of junior year I would say since there are quite a bit of scholarships out there for juniors. Hint: every where Nordstrom has a scholarship for $10,000 for junior. Look it up.
4.) This goes out to all my music majors, if are not taking private lessons, particularly singing start now! The best results come from people who have been preparing for college about the beginning of their junior year in high school.
5.) Push your self in school! My parents where extremely afraid of me failing classes so I never too AP classes or honor classes till my senior year. Don’t do this. Not because it will make a difference in scholarships and where you get excepted, but because you will always wonder if you could have gotten more and that wondering is the worst, especially when it comes to scholarships and money is involved.
Here are some good websites by the way :
www.fastweb.com- great site for scholarships and it has a lot of things involved with the DoSomething organization which encourages teens to participate in community service which helps other people too!
www.cappex.com- this site is great for a lot of things. Not only does it give you scholarships, but it gives you the chances of getting into a school based on grades, SAT/ACT, and community service.
www.youniversitytv.com- haha get it!!! well anyways, this site is really fun because you can tour colleges by watching countless videos from across the US and they have at least one school from each state. And besides just watching it is fun!
So I’ll add another post like this sometime to help out people with the whole college thing! And if you have any question ask and I could give you some advice and info. FAFSA in particular, I know very well.
Peace out!
