Palmer Trinity School

P A L M E R T R I N I T Y S C H O O L C O L L E G E H A N D B O O K / 2 0 2 3 - 2 0 2 4 8 RESEARCH, RECORD, REEVALUATE One of your tasks during your meetings with your college advisor is to create a college list that reflects the characteristics you are looking for in a college, such as size, location, and quality of academic or extracurricular programs, lifestyle, and so forth. You may come into your early meetings with some colleges already in mind. Your counselor will also make suggestions. You might also add names discovered through reading or conversations with relatives or classmates. Your preliminary list may very well include institutions unfamiliar to you. ese suggestions are there for a reason! So, make sure you take the time to research them. Never let yourself be guided by name recognition alone. Perhaps, in your counselor's opinion, a college that might be unfamiliar to you actually fits your academic and/or extracurricular needs as well, or maybe a recent Palmer Trinity graduate, with whom you have a good deal in common, had a great experience there. Researching colleges is among the most important tasks you will perform. e goal of your research is to develop a list of colleges that you will know well. To that end, you will need to use several sources to determine what makes each college unique and why each one on the list is appealing to you. From this list, you will choose institutions to visit during winter or spring breaks, holidays, over the summer and, ultimately, to apply to in the fall. RESEARCHING COLLEGES 1. General College Guides: Remember that these are someone else's assessments and views of a given college; do not let one source make a decision for you. We recommend that you research each college through several sources, then move on to the next college. You should consider acquiring your own personal copies of at least one of these guides. A number of publications provide general information about America's colleges. These include: The College Board's College Handbook; Barron's Profiles of American Colleges; Peterson's 4 Year Colleges. Others provide a more subjective view, including: Edward B. Fiske's The Fiske Guide to Colleges; and The Insider's Guide to Colleges, from The Yale Daily News. 2. The Internet: The internet is an extremely useful source of information for anyone involved in the college search. You can search college databases, including the one found on SCOIR, by location, size, major, and cost to find the right matches for you; you can request view books, and course catalogs; you can take a "virtual tour" of a campus, attend a virtual information session or even browse the curriculum. 3. Admissions Representatives at Palmer Trinity: Many colleges send representatives to Palmer Trinity in the fall to answer questions about their colleges. An up-to-date schedule of these visits will be available online in SCOIR, and will also be posted outside the College Advising Office. The visits will also be announced each morning during morning announcements. 4. PTS Alumni: You may have friends who are either in college or who have already gone through the college selection process. They can also be an excellent resource. Question them about their reasons for choosing certain colleges and avoiding others. See if those reasons fit your idea of preferred colleges; never cross a college off your list merely because a friend did not like it. Think for yourself! SECTION 3 BEGINNING THE SEARCH

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