Creating Your College List Event Informs Students’ Future Plans

Former M-A College Advisor Alice Kleeman hosted a “Creating Your College List” workshop for local juniors at the Redwood City Public Library on Monday. She walked students through her method for finding colleges within reach and discussed the many lenses to look at schools through. While she had lots of valuable advice to share, she also encouraged utilizing high school counselors and their resources.

After working at M-A for 20 years, Kleeman now hosts college guidance sessions at local libraries, where she assists students from various high schools in the college application process. She continues to read over 1,000 college application essays per year for M-A, TIDE Academy, and Woodside High School. She also volunteers to review essays for the Boys and Girls Club Future Grads program and students who attend her library presentations.

The event was exclusively for high school students, with juniors composing most of the group. Kleeman promoted a relaxed yet focused discussion among the 40 students in attendance. With her homemade chocolate chip cookies in hand, students joined the conversation by sharing their thoughts on the right number of colleges to apply to.

Kleeman addressed the common misconception that students must apply to 20 or more colleges, assuring that 20 colleges, by her count, is too many. Applying to that many schools delays deciding what one really wants in a college experience. Instead, she encourages students to apply to five to 10 schools, focusing on the quality of each application. “You’re going to end up with a shorter list and less stress,” Kleeman said.

According to Kleeman, one should count all the University of California (UC) schools as one application and the California State University (CSU) schools as one other application, with each additional public out-of-state or private school counting as one application.

The core of Kleeman’s college list strategy revolves around her framework of a “College A.” 

College A should be a school where one feels confident they will be admitted. Highly selective colleges and those that rely on holistic admissions beyond objective factors are much harder to predict. M-A college advisors can help students understand where they can gain admission into colleges based on objective factors like GPA. Additionally, Kleeman encourages students to keep an open mind when it comes to community colleges, noting that some of her past students continued on to transfer to private universities or UCs. “It doesn’t matter where you started. It matters where your ultimate degree comes from,” she said. 

After determining admissibility, College A should be affordable. Kleeman points students to individual colleges’ net-price calculators to get a general sense of affordability based on family income and financial aid. Some colleges include merit money for academic achievement in their calculations, but others do not. For that reason, she encourages students to keep a few favorite colleges on their list, even if their net-price calculations seem not quite affordable. There may be scholarships missed in the initial calculation, and the M-A college advisors have valuable insight when navigating financial aid processes like the FAFSA.

Finally, one has to be excited to go to College A. Kleeman stressed the importance of only applying to colleges that one would actually want to attend, in order to save time and prevent extra stress. “Find a College A, and the rest of it [the college list and applications] will be a lot less stressful,” Kleeman said.

After determining what makes a College A, Kleeman opened up the floor to students to discuss other criteria that may influence their college lists. Here were some of the themes mentioned and Kleeman’s advice:

Interesting Majors

• Find out whether one will graduate with a Bachelor of Science (BS), which is more focused on hard applications of science, or a Bachelor of Arts (BA) with more emphasis on society and public policy.
• Be aware of screened/impacted majors, such as engineering, computer science, and biology at certain universities, where one may have to compete more for limited spots in admission. 
• Browse course catalogs on the college websites. Research deeper than just interesting names of majors, looking into specific courses and the material they cover.

Ability to Change Majors

• If students are on the fence about their interests or want to explore many different subjects in college, it’s important to have the flexibility to change majors.
• The ability to change majors is not possible at every school, especially at schools that admit students by major. Switching into screened and oversubscribed majors is also extremely difficult at certain schools.

Undergraduate Population Size

• No matter what college a student attends, it will have more resources, so even small schools in the 2,000 student range will feel larger than high school.
• Both in small and large schools, students will build a community for themselves through classes, dorms, majors, extracurriculars, and freshman orientation groups. 

Average Class Size

• In a seminar-style class with five to 15 people, students are expected to contribute to conversation and keep up with all classwork to be prepared for discussion, but they also benefit from more personal connections to professors and classmates. 
• Larger colleges feature lectures by professors in a more anonymous crowd of over 100 students. Then, students meet in smaller sessions that are often taught by graduate students, who can help solidify understanding as rising experts in their fields. Choose schools that align with one’s preferred learning environment and style.

Underclassmen Research Opportunities

• Often, juniors and seniors are given priority in research opportunities, so ensure that the college offers accessible opportunities for underclassmen, if that is of interest.
• In application essays, many people name specific university faculty whose work excites them. Those faculty members may leave or no longer offer research positions, so it is important to have backup plans upon attending the school.

Semester Schedule

• Consider one’s interest in a two-semester system versus a quarter system, which features a faster learning style.
• Some schools even have a 4-1-4 or 4-4-1 schedule, where students have two semesters and an extra month-long term in the winter or spring to explore unique interests in depth. 

Curriculum Requirements

• Some schools have an open curriculum, with absolutely no requirements to take certain classes.
• Most commonly, schools will have general education or distribution requirements where students get to pick from a variety of classes to get credit in required subject areas, such as an art credit or a science credit.
• Schools with core curriculums require students to take specific classes to graduate. Decide what appeals most to one’s unique learning style.

Student Life and Extracurriculars

• Look at college websites’ online bulletin boards to get a sense of the student life and activities on campus.
• It doesn’t necessarily matter how many clubs are offered, so long as there are some that pique one’s interest.

Career Centers

• Students want to ensure that career guidance will be accessible early and easily, so that they aren’t walking into the career center for the first time in the middle of senior year to figure out post-college plans.

Proximity to Home

• Technology minimizes much of the distance between families, and it’s always important to establish boundaries when it comes to communication.
• For students staying very close to home, they will feel independent and find new experiences on campus, in San Francisco, and in California that keep the area exciting.

Diversity

• College is usually more diverse than high school, with students of various ages and backgrounds, veterans, and international students. Living in the Bay Area, diversity may be very important to some students.

Weather

• Here in California, students may be hesitant to attend college in a place with snowy winters. Unless that kind of weather really impacts one’s mood, Kleeman urges students to give it a chance. Winter will be novel in freshman year and tolerable in sophomore year, after one has adjusted. 

Kleeman intentionally leaves selectivity, prestige, and rankings out of her criteria for creating a college list. She repeatedly emphasized that a college’s selectivity is not synonymous with quality of experience. Prestige won’t benefit students’ success in the social environment or classes once they are admitted. 

College is really what every student makes of it, and Kleeman explained that fulfilling college years are defined by challenges that inspire growth within a supportive community. “Go to a college where you are going to feel both comfortable and uncomfortable,” she said.

“The most helpful part of the program was learning more about college admissions and just how it works. I think it helps me prepare for more colleges I want to apply to, just how to approach the essays,” Carlmont junior Matthew Lum said.

Although Kleeman loves working with students, she primarily encourages students to build relationships with their school counselors, whom they can meet with more often. “Work with the people in your high school. They’re experts, and they’re going to help you with this,” Kleeman said.

To connect with M-A’s College and Career Center, meet with Mai Lien Nguyen or Joshua Barraza and keep an eye out for their informative emails on a variety of college-related topics.