The blunder that many Nepali students make while applying to the USA education is lazy-college-search. There are hidden gems (universities/colleges) that are underlying that offer full-ride scholarships. There are many which offer full tuition scholarships, 75% tuition scholarships and so on. Students just run after famous names like Harvard and Stanford. These colleges offer you full scholarships but their acceptance rate is extremely low. Therefore, you should have all types of college in our list, otherwise you may end up crying next April.

Finding a college that accepts you with full scholarship is difficult and takes time. If you start in high-school, you will have a lot of time. Read articles under the “Scholarship Hunt” category to ease this process.

Okay, ready for the active-college-search. What are the different types of colleges that should be in your list? These different colleges are called reach colleges, target colleges, and safety colleges. Let’s inspect them one by one.

1. Reach colleges

These colleges have a very low acceptance rate, and you are not confident about getting accepted. However, you have hope and you want to take a chance with your best application. The famous universities that we were talking about falls under this category. You should have 2 to 5 reach colleges or universities in your list.

2. Target colleges

You have to spend more time to find these colleges and universities. You see very good chances of getting accepted in these unversitions as well as these universities offer the scholarship that you need, whether it be full-ride scholarship, full-tuition or certain percentage. You should watch out on the internet, blogs, niche.com, talk to your seniors, friends, attend webinars, engage in facebook groups, and do everything but have to find at least 10 target colleges. Be a vulture in this research process.

How will you know if the college will accept you or not? Look at your GPA, SAT score, involvement in ECAs, and so on. You can match the average stats of the respective college acceptance. But average stats are sometimes unlikely for Nepali background.

3. Safety colleges

Sometimes, things don't fall into place perfectly aligned. You may have to face rejection from all your reach and target colleges. In this case, the safety colleges will save you.These are the colleges that you are sure to be accepted. These colleges don’t require great SAT scores, nor GPA, nor do they care much about essays. Every college and university in the USA offer great education. Only loophole here is that you may end up getting little scholarships. However, there are many safe colleges that offer upto 100% tuition scholarships.

So, good luck with your active-college-search. Don’t settle for a single college option. Check out articles on the “Know Colleges” category to learn about the colleges listed there. Those articles are constantly updated according to the research performed by past students.

You can follow the college essay guy to build your college list in a structured way.

6 Step Guide to Choosing a College That's Right for You | College Essay Guy

In the next article, I will talk about ECAs. Meet you there.