 Hello, my people. My name is Meacham. I'm your college counselor, and your college list is easily the most important part of your entire application process. If you pick the right universities, you're going to get better chances of admission and better financial aid. If you pick the wrong ones, you might not be going anywhere. I have built the ultimate college list Google sheet for you, and I'm giving it to you for free so that I can help you get admitted. So all you got to do is go to the link in the description of this video, click on that link, and you will then see this list pop up. Now it is going to be set to view only. And if you ask me to share it with you with editor access, I will ignore you and make a copy. Make sure you're logged in already to your own account so that it will make a copy in your Google Drive, and then you can edit your copy all you want. So let's get started. The first thing you're going to want to do here is put in your annual budget. And this is super important because college is an important financial decision. If you don't know what your budget is, you're going to have a hard time figuring out what colleges you should apply to. So if you need to talk with your parents or figure this out, go ahead and do that. But like make sure that you have a realistic number here that reflects what your family can actually afford to invest into your education every single year. So let's say I just put in here an annual budget of $15,000 for now because I'm from Pittsburgh and I'm a Homer University of Pittsburgh is going to be like one of my first choices. And I figured I would use that as a great example to show you how to fill out all these things here. So obviously that's in Pittsburgh, which is in the USA. The financial aspect is easily the most important part here. If you can't afford a college and they can't give you the aid that you need so that you can afford it, you should not apply there. Don't waste your time with colleges that you will never be able to afford. So we need to do a little bit of research. So I'm just going to Google University of Pittsburgh, tuition, and we're going to go here and see what we get. Keep in mind that you may be a different kind of student. So it's important for you to select the right kind that you are. I'm going to go with first year undergraduate and non-Pennsylvania resident for most people because I think most of the time we're dealing with out of state or international applicants here on this channel and Mark, which school you're attending since there could be different costs involved here. I'm going to go ahead with arts and sciences for my purposes, total amount of tuition and other fees that are involved. And we're going to want to plug these numbers into our sheet $36,000 for that cost of tuition. That's quite a bit additional fees here, which I'm just going to kind of roughly estimate. That's about 2320. So we're still going to figure out our living costs here and we don't quite have that data just yet. Yeah. So we're going to go with this number for room and board, even though it could be like, you know, more expensive if we opted for a single cheaper, if we opted for a quadruple, we'll just go ahead with this number for now. I think this is reasonable $12,268. Okay. Now we have a total cost of about $50,588. That's a lot of dollars. Now we need to see how much we can reduce that automatic scholarships are going to be those merit based scholarships that you can just get by applying to the university that you're automatically considered for. Maybe the university offers some additional scholarships that could apply to you and you would have to apply for them. Put that amount in here to sort of think, okay, like if everything goes really well, how much should I get in terms of scholarships? We also have potential work income in here. As an international student, you're usually given the option to work on campus. And if you're, you know, a domestic student that you already have a few as nationality or permanent residency, then you can just work wherever you want. And you can sort of estimate how much you expect to work for internationals. I usually recommend putting about $6,000 here because I think that's usually a good estimate of what you can get. So we need to do a little bit of scholarship research. So I'm going to go back to their website here. Let's go ahead and search for scholarships. We've got merit scholarships here. They say that they need everything by December 1. And that this is for incoming first year students. So that seems to imply that that applies to everybody. They say they may range from 2000 per year to full tuition plus room and board, which is pretty rare. They say up to 20,000 per year. See, it's important to keep reading a little bit more because full tuition, that would be true if you were in state, 20,000 a year would definitely cover that. But as an international or someone from out of state, that will not cover. So let's say we could get $20,000 of automatic scholarship, which that's pretty cool. It looks like most of these scholarships are automatic scholarships. And the only ones that you would apply to are if you are a PA resident. For now, we're not going to put anything here in the applied scholarships area because none of those would apply to me. Between my scholarship possibilities and my work income possibilities, I still have this cost of attendance that is greater than my annual budget. And so I need to figure out if I can bring that down perhaps by using demonstrated need. So it's important to check this out because some universities will meet full 100% of demonstrated need for all admitted students. Some will not. Some will do that for internationals. Most will not. Your cost of attendance will be fully met once your financial aid has been taken into consideration. Okay. So they do meet 100% of demonstrated needs. So what that means here is I'm going to mark this box, even though right now my cost of attendance is higher than my annual budget, I may be able to get that cost brought down through forms like the FAFSA. As a public university, I'm pretty sure they don't do this for international students. If I was international, this is the best it can get. Okay. And if I definitely can't afford that extra $10,000, I should probably just stop right now and move on. This university is not going to work for me. As a US citizen, I look at this and say, okay, there's a shot, right? This is higher than this number, unfortunate. But this cost of attendance, even though it's higher than my budget, I could be able to bring that down by filling out the FAFSA, getting some financial aid from the government. For me, this is viable. Maybe for you, it's not. Now we're getting a little bit over here into some of the other factors that we want to consider for our universities. The major and courses you love, I put this in here because I think it's really, really important that you understand the program that you're applying to. And you also know some courses that you see in the study plan that really get your attention. And colleges often ask you as a questions about like why you want to study here and why you're choosing this program. And so if you can mention a few of those courses in those essays, it's going to show them that you've done your research. And it also makes it easier for you to get started with your studies. Size of a campus is an important variable. Class profile is usually a good link to look at. 4,400 students enrolled last year. And so I can just kind of ballpark that and say, okay, times that by like four or five. I think about 30,000 is probably just a good number. Again, this is just like a referential number for you to sort of have in mind. If you want that giant campus experience, or maybe you want that smaller, more personalized attention experience. And then what I want you to start doing in these columns is giving a rating. So there's dropdown boxes for all of these. I'll show you what this looks like. There's poor, okay, good or excellent. And so those are going to combine to kind of form a score to tell you how well of a fit this is. So if you think this is an excellent program, like you absolutely love the film studies major and the courses and you think it's excellent. It's like a great program for you. Go ahead and mark that location. Me, I love Pittsburgh. It's one of my favorite cities in the United States. I'm born there, raised there. It's an excellent location for me. Size rating. I think it's good. I could also see myself really enjoying like a smaller campus vibe. Here you're going to see I have a few things with some brackets and you can go ahead and customize this all you want to define your own factors, define your own things. What matters to you? Because this is the stuff that's going to determine how happy you are really over time. Activities, right? Like maybe there's things you want to get involved in. This is not a good place to go if you're interested in surfing. Rocket League, that would be one of my activities for sure. Does the University of Pittsburgh have a Rocket League team that I could try to join? Like let's let's search and see what happens. I don't know. Rocket League club. Okay, nice. Like this is the stuff you want to search for and look into. Like this is how you make friends in colleges by joining activities and meeting like minded people. And so if you really want to play Rocket League with people in your college, like you should look and see if they have this and look, they got like even a discord link that I could join and stuff. That's super cool. And I'm going to go ahead and say, yeah, that's, that's good. I like that. But maybe there's other factors that matter to you. Maybe you focus on prestige. Like you're worried about rankings. You shouldn't be, but maybe you are. Go ahead and put that here. Proximity to family. Maybe you have family living there. I got my aunts and uncles over there in Pittsburgh. I would love to be able to like hang out with them more. That would be super cool. Maybe you like to just eat really good food on campus and we've got Permanney brothers. That's excellent. Pittsburgh Steelers. Like maybe I want to just watch Pittsburgh Steelers games. I'm like a huge Steelers fan. Excellent. What do I care about? Because that's going to help me decide which colleges are right for me. When you understand, you know, what colleges are a good fit for you. You're more likely to get into those colleges. They're going to see that your interests align with their offerings. And when that happens, they can tell you're going to be a good fit and they're more likely to admit you. So everything from here to here is getting like a score, right? So for every excellent, I'm giving it two points. Every good gets one. A good way for you to kind of get an idea of how much you like those. And again, if you want to change these, if you want to add something, go ahead and add a column. As you build a college list, it's important to make sure that you align well with the college. When you are a good fit for a university, they will sense that they will feel that and they'll be more likely to admit you because of that. Now in the next video, I'm going to show you how to fill out this second tab here where we get into the admissions criteria to really determine your odds of getting into these colleges that you've put together on your list. So I'll see you next week.