OPTING FOR THE BEST
Posted by PG Team on December 10, 2008
DECIDING TO STUDY IN THE US IS A BIG STEP, THE TASK OF CHOOSING THE RIGHT COLLEGE OR UNIVERSITY TAKES TIME, ORGANISATION AND SOME SOUL SEARCHING. HERE’S THE PROCESS.
With over 4000 universities in the United States offering a variety of master’s and doctoral programmes, it becomes imperative that one chooses a school that best matches one’s needs. How do you go about determining which institution might best prepare you for the career goal you have in mind? Where do you look for authentic information? And what kind of information do you look at?
Here are some pointers and strategies that will help you in your search:
THE MANTRA
Gathering information: Understating that you have more choices than you thought possible is the beginning of wisdom. Gather as such information as you can about the programme and university of interest. That will make it easier for you to determine the programme and school that is best suited to you.
Identifying criteria: There are several criteria you might consider, but it is important that you add criteria of your own – ones that matter to you. Remember, every student’s search is different.
Get organised: Comparing schools that interest you most, can be quite a challenge. Use a chart to evaluate the factors most important to you. Add information such as academic demands, size, location, financial aid availability, admission requirements and international student application deadlines. Use the chart to quickly and easily compare the schools you have selected.
FIRST STEPS
Make a list of your interests and characteristics, as you start planning to apply to schools in the US. Who are you and what do you want? In what areas do your interests lie? What are your academic strengths? What are your weaknesses? What do you want to learn more about? What careers do you think you might enjoy? What financial resources are available to you? You might then find it helpful to ask good friends, family members and some of your teachers how they would answer these same questions about you and rework your list.
The next step would be to develop a profile of a college/university, which, based on your interests, abilities and goals, might be ‘ideal’ for you. Important factors to include would be academic programmes offered, level of academic challenge, selectivity, cost, and perhaps, size, location, setting, composition of the student body, and the availability of certain non-academic activities.
Once you have determined what is important about you – and to you – and the characteristics of the programme/university at which you think you can best develop these traits and achieve your aims, you are ready to look for specific programmes/universities which are good matches for you. Choosing a school is a process of eliminating choices that don’t fulfill your priorities.
Remember, conducting a thorough self-assessment at the beginning of your search for a graduate programme will serve you well throughout the application process and beyond.
WHERE AND WHAT TO LOOK FOR?
There are many complementary ways to learn about graduate programmes and schools. The first and perhaps the easiest is to talk with knowledgeable people around you, including relatives or older friends who have attended college/university in the US, teachers, and friends with older siblings, who are now in college. They may have first-hand knowledge of at least one college and can give you a flavour of what that college/university is like to attend.
To gain a more comprehensive view, explore guidebooks and university websites. They will give you important and accurate information about many individual colleges/universities. For graduate programmes, the Peterson’s Guide on specific fields of study are a great source of information on individual universities and specific departments, and are encyclopaedic in scope, objective and highly accurate references.
After this, you will want to start learning about colleges/universities directly from them, as they represent themselves in their viewbooks and catalogues. You can learn a tremendous amount about a college/university by what it chooses to say and display of itself (and also what it does not say or display), as well as by its style. You can also write to the individual colleges/universities themselves, requesting viewbooks and application materials.
Undoubtedly the best way to learn about a college/university is to visit the campus, though this is generally not possible for most students. An alternative to the campus visit is to meet with university representatives who visit your city.
[The credit of this article goes to the author who is the Programme Coordinator, Teacher Development Programmes at the United States-India Educational Foundation (USIEF), New Delhi, that administers the Fulbright programme, and is an EducationUSA advising centre with the US Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.]
