2. Be Open Minded
I can guarantee you that there are schools that would be the perfect fit for you, but you’ve never heard of them! The school that many students end up at may not have been their “dream school” at the start. But once they research it, they realize it’s the school for them.Unfortunately, we live in what I like to call a “bumper sticker society.” Everyone chooses a college according to what name makes the most attractive bumper sticker, one they can display with pride. There are close to 4,000 institutions of higher education in this country, and I guarantee you there is more than one school for you. Take the time to do the research, and when a college counselor, Web site, or search engine suggests a school, keep an open mind.
There are a lot of hidden gems from Colleges that Change Lives to Colleges for B students. There are various surveys on the web that can test your open minded when it comes to societal issues. But would you take the path less well worn? Would you turn down Harvard to go to Miami? Would you apply to small town even though you grew up in a big city? Could you go to an all girls school? Would going to a catholic school weird you out? A good college education should stretch you and not just intellectually. What is your reason for a college education?
In The Idea of a University by John Henry Newman
“[The purpose of a liberal arts education is to] open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, [and] eloquent expression. . . .”
“A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom. . . .”
“Knowledge is capable of being its own end. Such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward.”
“I hold very strongly that the first step in intellectual training is to impress upon a boy’s mind the idea of science, method, order, principle, and system; of rule and exception, of richness and harmony.”
“There is no science but tells a different tale, when viewed as a portion of a whole, from what it is likely to suggest when taken by itself, without the safeguard, as I may call it, of others.”
“If his [a student's] reading is confined simply to one subject, however such division of labour may favour the advancement of a particular pursuit . . . certainly it has a tendency to contract his mind.”
“A truly great intellect . . . is one which takes a connected view of old and new, past and present, far and near, and which has an insight into the influence of all these one on another; without which there is no whole, and no centre.”
“General culture of mind is the best aid to professional and scientific study, and educated men can do what illiterate cannot; and the man who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, who has refined his taste, and formed his judgment, and sharpened his mental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer, or a pleader, or an orator, or a statesman, or a physician, or a good landlord, or a man of business, or a soldier, or an engineer, or a chemist, or a geologist, or an antiquarian, but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the sciences or callings I have referred to, or any other for which he has a taste or special talent, with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger. In this sense, then, and as yet I have said but a very few words on a large subject, mental culture is emphatically useful.”
“One thing is unquestionable, that the elements of general reason are not to be found fully and truly expressed in any one kind of study; and that he who would wish to know her idiom, must read it in many books.”
Listen to what the Brit thinks of the evolution.
