Love Your List: List Your Love

Touring and selecting schools is an arduous process.  It takes nearly a year, it has dozens of variables, and often the decisions come down to intangible gut feelings. But those intangibles are difficult to write down, explain, or justify.

Which is why, when you’re looking for schools, you must write down at least three things you love about any school you’re planning on applying to.

When I say love, I mean love.

Every single school has things that are great about it. It might be nice dorms, top-notch academics, low tuition, ease of entrance, rolling admissions… the list goes on and on.

I don’t care if its your safety, your “ugh I don’t want to apply there but I have to,” match, or your “its so perfect I’m going to die” reach.

If you can’t find three things to love about each school you’re applying to, you shouldn’t waste your time and money filling out an application.

Why should you list your love?

1.     It will give you things to write about on your “Why ___?” Supplements

2.     LOVE YOUR SAFETY SCHOOLS LOVE YOUR SAFETY SCHOOLS LOVE YOUR SAFETY SCHOOLS. No explanation there. Just a hard cold truth.

3.     It will encourage you to put in effort on your applications.

4.     It will make things easier if you don’t get into your dream school, and give you things to be excited about.

5.     It will help you remember why you’re applying there when it’s 3AM and you have three chapters of Microecon to read and 6 more supplements to write.

So, for example, here was the Love list for my safety school:

1.     Small School, personalized attention, small- discussion based classes

2.     Close-ish to home, drivable, I could have a car freshman year

3.     Good arts department, draw in a lot of theatre majors, lots of theatre on campus. NOT HIPSTER.

Here was the Love list for the school I almost outright refused to apply to.

1.     Small class size, especially in the psychology department

2.     Excellent male to female ratio

3.     Close to home, lots of family nearby

4.     So few drama students that they give out scholarships for theatre (!)

(I may have thought that I was going to double major theatre and psychology at that point… Summer after my junior year proved otherwise, but that’s a story for another day).

Those were two schools that I didn’t love overall, but I found things to love about them.

So remember, in order to love you list, you must list your love.