1. Get a list of careers that match your personality, work values, and or interests

2. Explore those careers and narrow down your list to one or two

3. Explore colleges that meet your criteria, especially your intended career/major

4. Make a list of colleges that you plan to apply to

How does this connect to making a college list?

College is a pathway to a career, in other words you go to college to eventually enter a career of your choice. Which means in order to make a list of colleges you are going to apply to, you have to have some idea of what career you want in the future. 

How can I find some career matches? 

MaiaLearning offers three different surveys for free. One survey asks about your interests, one asks about your work values, and the final one asks about your personality. All three then provide you with a list of careers that match your results. 

To access the surveys you have to login using your PPS student account, then use the left-hand side menu to click on the "Character" tab. 

My advice is to take all three and see which careers come up more than once, if a career shows up on all three survey results that might be a sign that it's a really good match for you.

I have my career matches, what now?

Now that you have some career matches make sure you read up on each one. If you used the MaiaLearning surveys you can click on each career and it will give you more information about that job. 

You can also google it, for example, you can google "What does an accountant do?" and you will get many helpful results. YouTube is also helpful if you prefer a video over text. 

There are other ways to explore careers, like job shadowing, internships, and career related events where they talk about specific careers. 

The idea is to weed out any careers you wouldn't want to do. Narrowing this down to one or two careers will make the next step a lot easier. 

Now that I have one or two careers I want to pursue, what do I do next?

First, check to see if your career(s) require a college degree, and which kind of degree. For example, if you want to become an electrical engineer you will definitely need a college degree and you will also need to go to a college that offers an electrical engineering degree. 

An easy way to do this is to google it, for example you can google "do mechanical engineers need a college degree?" and you will get many helpful results explaining that yes you need a college degree to become a mechanical engineer. 

How can I explore colleges? 

MaiaLearning is one easy way to search for colleges using different criteria. After logging in using your PPS student account, use the left-hand side menu to click on the "Universities" tab. This should take you to the college search function. 

The search function lets you search for colleges using different criteria, for example, the first thing you should be making sure is that they offer the degree you will be pursing. To do that, click on "More" and then on "Programs/Majors", search and select the degree you plan on pursuing, then it will only show you colleges that offer that degree. 

You can also join one our College Rep Visits where colleges send a representative to Roosevelt to give you info about their college. 

What criteria should I look at when exploring?

As mentioned before, the first criteria should be that they offer the program/major you are pursuing. The other important criteria to consider is: location, school size, and competitiveness. 

Location - where the school is located is often a big factor for students. Some students want to stay close to home, some want to leave Oregon, others don't really care, some want to avoid certain states, decide what is important to you and do your college search based on that.

School Size - do you care about class sizes and how large the campus is? Would you prefer a large campus with 30,000 or more students? Or does that sound like a nightmare and you want a small campus? Maybe something in the middle like 10-15,000 feels more right to you. 

Competitiveness - do you want to go to a school that is very competitive like Harvard or Stanford? Or do you want more of a supportive environment where there isn't a grading curve and you don't have to compete for the top spot in the class? An Ivy League College will have a different environment than your average state school, decide which kind you thrive in. 

You should add as much criteria as you can using the different options MaiaLearning gives you. This is to narrow down the list to a reasonable number.

I have selected my criteria and have a narrowed down list, what next?

Now click on each school on your list and read up a bit more about it. MaiaLearning also provides videos where students talk about their experiences at that school. The community tab has info about their demographics, student clubs, and support services. There are many tabs to explore, use them to get an idea of what the school is like and whether you would like to go there. 

As you explore the schools keep a separate list of which ones you want to apply to, and when you are ready for the next step, click here.