Collegewise counselor Katie Konrad Moore has helped over 500 kids find the right colleges. Here are three tidbits I took away from her great session yesterday for our new Collegewise counselors about how to guide students through the college search process:
1. The College List Wiki has great lists of colleges culled together by counselors and grouped into categories like specific majors, campus characteristics, types of aid available, etc.
2. Lots of our counselors use the college search function at collegeboard.com to quickly generate a list of schools based on characteristics like size, location, private vs. public, etc. But Katie also mentioned that if she’s doing a search for a student that does not include a particular major preference, she’ll enter a common major anyway, like biology. The reason? It eliminates specialty schools (like art schools) from the results.
3. Need to give a student a visual representation of the area surrounding a college? The satellite view of Google maps can tell you a lot. For example, Grinnell College is in the middle of rural Iowa. Google Maps makes that abundantly clear.