Hi! If you don’t know who I am, my name is Nadia and I’m going to be attending university starting September 2021. Speaking from experience, I know that choosing a university program can be really challenging, so here is some advice from someone that has recently gone through the entire process of applying to universities. I live in Ontario, Canada and applied to universities mainly in Ontario, so my experience is probably going to be very different from your own if you’re applying to schools in the US, or anywhere else in the world. Nonetheless, deciding on a program or a career path is universally hard.

What are your interests?

I know that you’ve probably heard this hundreds of times before, and if this piece of advice isn’t helping, perhaps you’re not thinking of it in the right way. Of course, you should be considering any hobbies that you enjoy doing, causes you’re passionate about, and subjects that you enjoyed in high school, but you need to remember that you’re not just going to university to learn new things. You are going to university to be able to get a job, presumably, to develop your knowledge and employable skills, and to get some job experience. Because of this, you need to choose your major with a few different career paths in mind that you are interested in. It’s all about balancing your interest for the subject, and the employability of your degree in a career field that you think you will enjoy. If you choose a program based on a hobby alone, you may find it difficult to get a job afterwards, and if you choose a program based solely on its employability, or how much money you think you’ll make, you probably won’t enjoy your job. This brings me to my next point:

Research, research, and research! 

The internet has thousands upon thousands of resources, and you need to take advantage of these resources by researching everything and anything that you’re not sure about. Research schools, programs, careers, and everything else in between. What helped me in the beginning was making a table with different programs from different schools, just to get an idea of what I wanted to major in. Once you get a better picture of the subject area that you want to study in university, you can make another table comparing programs across different schools, weighing pros and cons, benefits and doubts, and anything and everything else.

Don’t forget to talk to your friends, teachers, older siblings, and university students to gain some real-world perspective outside of the internet (the internet can be a scary place). When you are choosing a school, there are so many different factors that you should take into consideration like location, class size, school vibe, and tuition, just to name a few.

At the end of the day, remember that you are not alone in this process, and that thousands of other high school students are trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives as well. No matter what path you decide to go down, have confidence in yourself that you can make it. Good luck!