Many applicants to the most selective university programs share high grades, high test scores, solid recommendations and generous doses of community service and volunteer activities. Yet, if they want to set themselves apart from the pool of exceptional students, a significant research experience in STEM or the social sciences helps.
The better you know prospective campuses, the better you can figure out which might fit in with your postsecondary expectations. If you don’t have any or few expectations formed as yet, doing some research will get your thoughts of college into motion.
A good place to begin a search is with guides such as Fiske, Princeton Review, The Ultimate Guide to America’s Best Colleges, and the Yale Daily News Insider’s Guide to Colleges.
Grinnell, since its inception in 1846, has been a leader of ‘progressive’ movements of many sorts: it was the first college west of the Mississippi River to grant degrees to women and blacks. Today Grinnell, which is located in the rural corn fields of Iowa about an hour from Des Moines and Iowa City, continues its progressive tradition
If there were but one factor I could review to determine the effectiveness of a college or university’s program it would certainly not be the US News and World Report Rankings, or the 25 and 75 percentile SAT scores of the incoming class, or even the number of Rhode scholars, or Fulbright scholars it has graduated over the last 10 years. Instead, I’d rather see the school’s retention rate: the number of freshmen students who return for their sophomore year at the same school. Experience tells us that freshman year in college is a massive adjustment. Those schools who can guide their students successfully through freshman year are gems, because a lot of students fail to successfully make the transition in college.
