How to Best Prepare for College

As nearly graduated seniors, we endeavor to share our wisdom on the beautiful mess that is the college decision process. Here is our 10-part guide:

1. Dollars per Acre

When researching any college, it is absolutely paramount to divide the full cost of attendance by the acreage of the campus in order to find the dollars per acre. You want to know how many dollars each acre costs in order to truly know whether or not it’s worth it at all. After all, every step you take on campus has a price. I have listed the dollars per acre of several top U.S. universities, and, as you will see, Stanford is by far the best deal in terms of acreage! Just eleven dollars! That’s the price of two cheap smoothies. 

Warning: be careful with colleges in Europe. It’s very difficult to find the acreage for these schools. For some mysterious reason, they don’t let the public know. If you seek to count the acres yourself, that is up to your discretion. It’s also sometimes possible to find the square meters, and you could potentially convert this to acres, but it’s just not the same. We highly recommend you take this into account regarding college abroad. 

Brief dollar per acre index 

Harvard College: $82,866/209 acres = $396.49 per acre 

Yale University: $90,975/1,108 acres = $82.12 per acre

Princeton University: $86,700/1,680 acres = $51.62 per acre

Columbia University: $89,587/32 acres = $2799.59 per acre

New York University: $87,448/230 acres = $380.21 per acre

Stanford University: $96,513/8,180 acres = $11.80 per acre

UC Berkeley (CA residents): $42,508/1,232 acres = $35.50 per acre

UCLA (CA residents): $42,059/419 acres = $100.38 per acre

Georgetown: $81,404/104 acres = $782.73 per acre

Amherst College: $88,210/1,000 acres = $88.21 per acre

University of Chicago: $93,633/217 acres = $431.49 per acre

University of Michigan: $78,329/3,070 acres = $25.51 per acre

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: $85,960/168 acres = $511.67 per acre

2. College Decision Simulator 

In order to prepare for the nerve-wracking moment of opening your college decision, it is helpful to first acclimate yourself to both outcomes: acceptance and rejection. Though an acceptance to a dream school would make anyone jubilant, you never know how you’ll react to your first rejection unless you’ve somehow received one without having to receive one. Yes, that’s right– no more anxiety about your decision. You can actually pretend to get rejected/accepted without the terrible weight of reality dawning over you. There are many websites that can simulate a college decision from a wide range of schools. These decisions are strangely realistic; they even make you type in your email address and password for their portals to then click on a status update. Some websites will always give you acceptances, some will do just the opposite to prepare you for rejection, but most are random. For fun, my friends and I jokingly generated decision letters for Mary Shelley and William Shakespeare. Mary Shelley got rejected from her dream school, Stanford, but was accepted into the University of Chicago. She loves it at UChicago despite the crushing rejection from the school she believed she was bound to go to. Rejection is truly redirection! Shakespeare, on the other hand, could not bear his rejection from Georgetown and sailed home to England to apply in the UCAS system, where schools actually tell you why they rejected you. At least he’ll know his weak points when he applies next year.

3. Number of Ponds  

Where your college is located will affect the number of ponds present. As you deliberate between whether or not you want a more rural or urban college, it’s essential to consider the quantity of ponds, because this will affect how much bread you need to have at your disposal when you come across the many ducks. Moreover, if there is an overwhelming number of ducks, you cannot just feed them bread, as it isn’t ideal for their health. You’ll have to vary the foods. We recommend oats, rice, frozen peas, chopped lettuce, corn, or grapes. That’s a lot to have on hand, so make sure you’re ready for that. Of course, you could very well not feed the ducks since you do have the freedom to choose not to, although that’s kind of rude (the ducks may even accuse you of living inauthentically). In this case, the number of ponds will still affect the ecosystem you’ll be living in for four years. The ponds enhance biodiversity, contribute to the water cycle, and can store carbon which is always practical for when you have too much carbon. However, they can also attract mosquitos. On another note, we strongly suggest that you observe your potential college’s pond during the winter and try to find out where the ducks go when it freezes over. Where they go is said to be a significant indicator of the overall course your life will take if you choose to enroll at the college in question. 

4. Mascots

A university’s mascot is arguably the most important factor in your college decision. When picking a college, you may jump to worrying about things like tuition and academics, but these things are just a distraction from the real issue you are inevitably faced with: the mascot that will represent you for not only the next four academic years but for the rest of your life. Your school’s mascot is, therefore, no laughing matter. You’ll see it everyday in college: on hallway walls, apparel, water bottles, pencils, and many other recurring places– even your own things. You’ll encounter it during school games and events– the iconic figure of your school drawn on people’s faces with holy face paint. Further, once you graduate, your house will be filled with your macot’s face printed on the miscellaneous items demonstrating the school spirit that you once sported during those good ol’days. Your name will always be associated with your mascot as a direct consequence of your attendance at the school. Plus, you can’t just erase the image of your school’s mascot from your mind– like never, ever. Do you really want Brutus the Buckeye from Ohio state on your mind 24/7? How about the eight-foot tall Lil’ Red from University of Nebraska-Lincoln standing over your shoulder while you read on the campus grass? Or worse– Western Kentucky’s terrifying mascot, Big Red, plastered on the cafeteria’s walls before game day? Unless you like scary things, I’d go for a school with a more normal mascot.

Brutus the Buckeye, photo via The-Ozone.

5. Infrastructure Strength 

Infrastructure strength is another important element to ponder on your college decision journey. No one wants to walk over rickety floors that threaten to collapse under them everyday nor rely on an air conditioning system that will leave them feeling hotter than Dante in hell. A school with questionable infrastructure will make you question why you decided to go there in the first place. You may think, however, that testing such strength is hard to do as a prospective student– but you would be mistaken. An easy way to measure your college’s physical robustness is to simply visit the college in question, which is easy because a lot of schools will actually fly you out upon acceptance, and conduct a few simple tests. Upon arrival, you will immediately want to jump on the floors of every relevant building with the most force as possible. If the floors can handle your jumps, it will be able to carry the inflow of students joining the existing student population in the fall. Next, you’ll want to definitely make sure to test the water system in your dorm. Conduct a little experiment by recording how long it takes the water to get hot, as well as to lose its heat. You definitely don’t want a shower that makes you waste your precious college years waiting or that gets cold right away. Lastly, feel free to bump into a couple pieces of furniture or sit down on chairs with great strength to see if anything breaks. Unreliable furniture can make or break your studying time at college, so having sturdy pieces at your disposal is crucial when picking where you’ll be spending the next four years of your life.

6. Obtusity or Acuity of Campus

This refers to the application of the common mathematical definition we have of obtusity and acuity (an angle greater than or less than 90 degrees) onto our perception of college campuses. If the campus is acute, it will feel sharp and dense, as if the two intersecting segments were closing in on you. If the campus is obtuse, it will feel large and blurred, as if the two intersecting segments were branching out into the vastness of the world. 

A prime example of an acute campus would be Emerson College. Its main campus is a building at the corner of two streets in Boston and consists of 8 acres, which is far less than the aforementioned acreages. If a concentration of vibrant intellectual thought and dynamic activity in a small area appeals to you, consider an acute campus. Boston University also has some acuity as it’s primarily composed of many buildings intertwined with the city, despite nonetheless displaying a mighty acreage of 140. I would maintain that NYU, however, is more of a right angle situation. 

Stanford has already shown that it’s incredibly obtuse, which resulted in a fantastic price per acre. However, another example would be Middlebury College. If you ever do a Google Street View tour of the campus, you’ll see an awful lot of bikes. Indeed, high obtusity means longer walks to get classes, hence the need to bike. You will likely see less people as well because everything is more spread out. Don’t be fooled, however, by location. While a campus in the countryside will often appear more obtuse, and a more urban campus more acute, this isn’t always the case. At an information session for the University of St Andrews, I was told that the campus was relatively acute, despite it being in the great Scottish highlands. 

7. The Amount of Paper in their Mail

Colleges LOVE to send unsuspecting highschoolers unwanted mail. Most of us disregard this spam as meaning nothing to their actual college prospects. We know why we want to go to our dream schools, so stop sending us more information! If it doesn’t mean you want us anymore than anyone else, why are you giving us false hope in our mailboxes? They seem utterly useless and, honestly, a bit obsessive on the part of the schools. But what if these hefty packets in the mail actually meant something? They just might. Data shows that the amount of papers that colleges dispense on their mailed packets correlates to students’ merit to go to said school. In fact, the number of pages you get in the mail from colleges is a strikingly accurate measure of your worth as a person! Forget about whether you get accepted or not, the real telling of how much you deserve to go to college lies in the quantity of paper these institutions are willing to spend on you. Know your worth, dear readers.

8. Number of Emails 

We’re all used to receiving a preposterous number of emails from colleges, whether you have shown an interest in them or not. These emails invade your inbox and can range from “Look at how pretty our library is!” to “Do we have the right email address? Why aren’t you answering us?” Maybe you don’t have your email notifications on and consequently are never notified, or you press delete as soon as you see them, but if you’re figuring out where to apply, or if you’re deciding on a college, take a moment to look back on all of those emails. 

According to recent studies, the number of emails a college sends you correlates with the extent to which the college is obsessive. If a college is sending you a few emails, they probably really like you; however, when they send you too many, they’re showing signs of obsessive behavior. Going to an obsessive college can be really scary and stress-inducing. So take note of the rate at which these emails are sent. Monthly? Weekly? Daily?! Also look at the content of the email itself, as this can influence how you feel about the college. For instance, I once received an email from Bowdoin that said, “Send us a boop back!” and it was a polar bear booping the camera with its snout. That’s the whole reason why I applied there. So check your emails! 

9. Famous Alumni

Some say that going to a university with many well-known alumni is a good indicator of its strength as a school. This assumption could not be more wrong. Students who attend schools with famous alumnus must walk the halls of greatness knowing they will never be as great as those who once walked. They are under immense pressure to live up to big names, which damages their own self-esteem. Imagine going to Columbia University for political science and being forced to compare yourself to former president Barack Obama or to Harvard just to be worse at philosophizing than Henry David Thoreau? Fret not, for there is a way to check whether a school’s alumni are too iconic to measure up to. You can use a point system in which an alum gets a point for changing the world, one for being well-known, one for being a president, and an extra one for being cute. Let’s just say, it would be very difficult to size up to Obama.

10. Size of Vents of Dorms 

Prospective students tend to place great importance on a college’s dorms, except there is one element of the dorm that must never be overlooked: the size of the vents. Imagine. You’ve just had an exhausting day—an enthralling class on bioethics, lunch with your friends, singing acapella, studying at the library, volunteering at the farm, etc—and you are finally ready to retire for the night. Then you hear a scream. An intruder has entered from the vents! 

Vent size is fundamental to your safety on campus. It’s simple: the larger the vents, the higher the chance of robbery. Studies show that college dorms with larger vents—that is, often spacious enough for a human to fit—report higher crime rates in the dorms and also just in general. When you’re visiting colleges, you’ll want to try crawling in the vents. If possible, try getting other people to do so as well, such as your parents, in order to obtain a comprehensive measure of vent size and the effort it takes to break into a dorm. It’s possible that somebody will try to stop you. However, once you calmly explain what you are testing, they will undoubtedly understand and let you continue. A smaller vent size also reduces venting, which is another important factor, seeing as venting can sometimes be tiring and disagreeable. 

You could even eliminate vents altogether if you move to Europe where radiators are far more popular. The majority of universities on UCAS (the U.K. system) don’t have much ventilation and rely on radiators, and there’s minimal risk of robbery with radiators.