Prep Work

Thinking about college or what you are going to do after high school can start at a young age. The only thing with starting to think about life after high school at a young age is that things change a lot from when you are in middle school to being a senior in high school for most kids. Either their career path changes or their choice in college changes. A great time to start doing prep work for life after high school is at the start of freshman year. When everyone starts freshman year, it is a new chapter in their lives. Being out of high school and moving onto things after starts to feel real and like it is getting close during that first year of high school. During freshman year, a lot of kids know at least a little bit about what they want to do after high school. There is a lot of work that goes into finding out what college to go to, but you do not want to start looking too early. If you start looking too early then it can get overwhelming and can lead to people feeling stressed out. From what happened in my high school career, learning about colleges and figuring out what I wanted to do after high school and which college to go to, it helped me in my senior year choosing the right college for me. It was a big help being able to learn about the prices and programs different colleges had to offer. Starting out searching for a good college or even a good major as a freshman really opened my eyes to seeing how many great jobs and schools there were. Doing that prep work as a freshman made me realize that college really was important to go through and choosing that college that would be a great fit for me would make those hard and stressful college years so much easier. I feel like if I would have started my prep work for college sooner than freshman year, I would have not cared and felt that it was unnecessary to be doing all that extra work. College would not have felt as important to me as it did when I started prep work freshman year.Some people believe it is good to start prep work for college sooner than freshman year. They might think that the sooner you start the sooner you will figure out everything and have more information under your belt. Granted, you might have more information, but in reality, you might be tired of doing all that work for college if it is further than four years away. If you get tired of doing all that prep work so early, they might end up not even paying attention to the details all that much. They might not even want to even apply for college because they are burnout from all the years of prep work beforehand. You do not want to get started early on preparing for college if you know for a fact that it will end up getting too stressful and be too much for you. The only way I could see starting the prep work early is if you do not look very deep into it and you just start browsing the options. Even then, you could end up finding a school you really like at that point in your life but then once it comes time to go there, you do not like it anymore. There are so many reasons why you do not want to start preparing for college too early.

“college” by Sean MacEntee is licensed under CC BY 2.0.Copy text