It starts out small, probably during your sophomore year, with the occasional college brochure arriving mixed in with the rest of your family’s mail. You are excited to receive the glossy booklets and interactive CDs, and you eagerly look through them, maybe putting them in a pile on your desk or a table when you’re finished looking at them.
Pretty soon, the pile begins to grow. And grow. You start getting more mail than anyone else in your family, and you are asked repeatedly to do something with this huge pile of brochures. You want to keep things organized, but you’re not sure where to start. Managing the approximately 60 lbs. of college information you are likely to receive as you are entering the college selection process doesn’t have to be a challenge if you have a plan from the start.
The simplest way to handle all this mail is to get yourself three boxes. Label them “Definitely,” “Maybe,” and “Not a Chance.” In the first box, put the brochures from schools that you are definitely interested in. These are the schools that have most of, if not all, the qualities you have identified as most important in a school you want to attend.
