Making The Big Decisions

Choosing The Right University and Program.

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The transition from high school to post secondary can be extremely nerve-wracking and can take up a lot of time before a final decision has been made. One of the main reasons we started this blog Student Coaches was to help students like you throughout the journey of selecting the right university and program that best fits your desires.

As a student living in Canada your options are limitless when making the choice of where you wish to take your post secondary education. Within Canada there are over 98 universities and 150 colleges that you can select from. To many students these numbers may sound overwhelming, but don’t worry, you have plenty of time to make this decision. However, if you don’t know where to start, that’s what we, the student coaches, are here to help you with. On our universities webpage we provided you with short descriptions and links to all the top universities within Canada. Each school is put into a designated category based on location and is easy to navigate through. Soon we will be releasing an additional blog feed on this site called the “Coaches Reports” which will be an in-depth look of all these universities from a student’s perspective. We will focus on two universities per week (This upcoming week will feature UBC and U of T).

Secondly, it is very important to consider whether you want to stay local or go away from home. Although you may not know it now but being home or going away can both have its pros & cons and should never be disregarded. Therefore, in order to help you we have developed a great matrix tool for evaluating whether to stay home or go away. This spreadsheet has criteria such as cost of living, suitable accommodations, interesting & relevant course to name a few. All criteria can be rated from a scale of 1-10 and combined to form a final value. This value then can be compared with your other university options to help you decide which option best suits you. We believe that this is a spectacular way to make progress in selecting your ideal university. Since we were in your position, we faced the same problems and decided to create a tool that would help us make a better decision. Ultimately we both made the decision to leave home and attend Queen’s University. Looking back we are extremely happy we made this decision. Being away from home forced us to become more mature and self-reliant; it gave us the ability to prepare for the real world that awaits us after university.

Once you have a better idea of whether you prefer to stay home or go away, you can now narrow your options and focus on more concrete choices. As these choices become more appealing you should make sure to do one or more of the following tasks. 1) reach out to a guidance counsellor 2) Speak to former high school alumni that attend a school you are interested in 3) make sure to attend university/college fairs close to you. Guidance counsellors are a great source of information when it comes to selecting a school especially once you have narrowed down your options. In our personal experiences we found that getting a helping hand from a guidance counsellor was extremely valuable. Not only getting the opinion of a trained professional but also talking to someone in the educational sphere was a fantastic way of formulating our choices. Finally, make sure that you attend university and college fairs that are within your area. By attending these fairs, you can gain some valuable knowledge about your schools of interest and the programs they have to offer.

One great tip that we student coaches can give you is to try your absolute best in high school. We understand how fun high school can be and the difficulty of maintaining focus through the entire senior year. However, as we step into our third year of university we have taken some time to really look back and thank our former selves for doing the best we could. By working hard in high school we were able to achieve high marks that gave us the opportunity to enter a phenomenal program. The bottom line is you only get what you put in.

Given the situation arises that you have decided on a university but are undecided on a specific program, you have to keep in mind you can always swap programs once you arrive at university. With this, our advice would be to choose the program that has a higher acceptance average. This gives you more options once you arrive to university. Generally, it is easier for a student to switch into a program that originally has a lower acceptance average then their current program. Therefore, be focused and strive to get the best marks you can in high school.

Thank you for reading our first article and we hope that this will help you select the right school and program for you. If you have any questions about this article or are interested in any other tips, we look forward to hearing from you! Contact us!

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