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AS THE college application process continues to shift over to the Internet, companies are beginning to offer tools to prospective students in the form of matchmaking and scholarship search engines.
The Princeton Review's Counselor-O-Matic and Monster.com's FastWeb are among the many online features designed to inform students of available scholarships or help narrow down their lists of colleges.
Online tools such as these abound for prospective college students, but should students be taking their advice? "They have their value," said Janet Hack, the college counselor at St. Mary's College High School in Berkeley. "You just have to be an informed consumer. It might work best as a starting point, because what looks like a match on paper might not be a match for someone's personality."
The Counselor-O-Matic feature on the Princeton Review's Web site and other comparable services generally ask questions concerning a student's academic progress, creative interests and demographics for the kind of school that he or she wishes to attend. Counselor-O-Matic has its share of humorous and irrelevant questions that include your bench-warming status on a sports team and whether you are the son or daughter of a celebrity.
After clicking your way through the eight-page questionnaire, the information is analyzed and a list of "good match," "reach" and "safety schools" is revealed. The schools that appear on the list don't guarantee a student's admission into those campuses; it is based solely on how good of a fit the student may be according to the data provided. A portion of the schools that show up under each category might be ones that the student hasn't heard of, and in some cases, will lead the person to apply there.
My own Counselor-O-Matic list was narrowed down to schools that offered degrees in journalism and communications studies, since these were my intended majors. I also shared my interest for colleges located either on the West Coast or in the Northeast.
The results showed a number of schools that I was considering, but there was one university on top of my "good match" category that didn't immediately ring a bell. Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, Pa., was a long way from the sunny skies of the Bay Area, but I ended up applying there after learning more about the school and communicating with its student representatives.
Once the college applications are out of the way, then comes the worry of how to pay for it all. I have applied to four scholarships since my senior year began. I learned about three of them through the search engine FastWeb.com and one from my mother's program at work.
FastWeb.com generates a variety of scholarships from the information you supply on the ubiquitous questionnaire, but its Web pages are bombarded with their share of pop-ups.
"The ads don't bother me too much. I find FastWeb to be more reliable for legitimate sources than simply searching on Google," said Grace Chiu, a senior at Dublin High School.
FastWeb and other related tools are available to students for free as a result of these advertisements, or fees paid by colleges or from the selling the names of prospective students.
When it comes to gaining acceptance, though, these matchmaking and scholarship Web sites draw a weak line between compatibility and selectivity. "I lost count of all the scholarships I've applied to. The truth is, I haven't really heard back from any of them so far," Grace said.
What you're able to do on a computer monitor will also never substitute for visits to your colleges of choice and getting a firsthand experience of life there.
"There are things you can't really tell until you walk on the campus," Hack, the counselor, said. "College matchmakers can't really help you with the intangibles."
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