More Than a Test Score

College decisions have been made. You’ve either hit the “submit” button or dropped that envelope in the mailbox. The first step is to take a (huge) sigh of relief and celebrate! It’s taken four or more years of dedication, preparation and some serious decision making to get you to this point and that shouldn’t be forgotten. But, many of you are likely thinking – what comes next?

Your college will be sending you a few other important pieces of information now that you’ve made your deposit. These may come in multiple packages or emails or all bundled into one, so be on the lookout. Our first, and most important, tip is to read everything you get from your college and to read it as soon as you get it. Turning these documents in on time is important (it can make the difference in getting into the dorm that you want or into that class that you’re dying to take) – in fact, the earlier the better in most cases.

Be on the lookout for…

Housing Forms

If you plan to live on campus, these forms will include a housing application and housing contracts. At many colleges, you get the chance to rank your choices between a few dorm options. Here are some key things to consider:

• Location, location – Is the dorm located near dining options? Near where your classes will be? This is especially important to consider if you’re planning a major where many of the classes are in one building. Do you workout regularly or are you an athlete? If so, make sure to check out proximity to the gym.

• Room layout – Rooms with a sink in them are great for those nights that you don’t want to trek down the hall to the bathroom to brush your teeth. Built-in storage options (shelves, etc.) can help you stay organized. Also, beds that can be lofted provide more options as to how you and your roommate(s) can arrange the space.

The Housing Department website will include information about the location and layout of the different options available. It’s also a good idea to check out some review sites like College Prowler to hear what students on campus are saying about different dorms. But, remember, even if you don’t get your first choice… college living is often less about the space and more about who you share it with!

That said, another thing that usually goes along with the housing forms is a roommate selection document or questionnaire. If you’re not planning on rooming with someone you already know, fill out the roommate questionnaire and be honest. Colleges do make an effort to make the best matches based on your answers. If you’re planning on choosing your own roommate – think carefully. Here’s some good advice from our partners at Her Campus℠ on the pros and cons of rooming with someone you already know.

Orientation & Course Selection Information

Many colleges offer orientation programs for incoming freshmen. Some offer multiple dates, others offer specific dates for specific majors, and – on many smaller campuses – orientation happens at the same time for all students. If you get the option to sign-up for an orientation date, try to sign up for the earliest one possible. Orientation is often when course selection occurs. It may be tempting to push it off, but an earlier orientation may give you a better shot at getting into some of the more popular courses. Course selection (exciting!) is such an important topic that we’ll be dedicating a whole article to it next week so, make sure to check back!

Medical Forms

These will likely come from your college’s Health Services department. This will include important information on any immunizations or physicals that you need to get before you step on campus. Make sure to read these over carefully as you’ll likely need to set up a doctor appointment or two over the summer. For most colleges, this packet of information will also include details about your student health insurance.

The Bill

You will also receive your 1st semester or 1st quarter bill this summer. Most schools require this to be fully paid before you can start classes. Don’t be afraid to call up the Financial Aid office (or even set up an in-person appointment if you’re close) if you need help figuring things out – that’s what they are there for! Most schools expect lots of questions from incoming freshmen and will have multiple team members from that office “on call” to help as soon as the bills arrive.

This is such an exciting time! Taking care of the more administrative side of things is not always the most fun, but is really important. So – read what your college sends you, take the required actions as soon as possible, and then… relax and start looking forward to all the fun (and learning) you have ahead of you!

Getting a good career is job #1 at college these days. And who would be surprised? With ballooning student loan debt and with a very uncertain job market, most every student is worried about what awaits him or her after college. One of the main steps to getting a good job is the interview: the face-to-face with the potential employer in which you try to put your best foot forward.

Follow our dozen time-tested tips to rock your next job interview>>

Today’s guest post is by TuitionCoach, an online consulting service that offers tips, interactive tools, and deals to ensure students plan better for the cost of college.

Getting in to your dream school is only the first part of the journey—figuring out how to pay for it all is an even bigger challenge! To ease the confusion surrounding college costs, here is some expert advice to help you examine and understand your financial aid packet.

In this article we’ll cover the most essential aspects of a student’s financial aid packet, including:

•The Expected Family Contribution (EFC)
•How the financial aid formula works
•Understanding the financial aid award
•Negotiating a better financial aid

What determines the Expected Family Contribution (EFC)?

When it comes to calculating your parent’s EFC, there are dozens of variables at work. The four primary factors are:

1. Your parent’s adjusted gross income. That’s the number at the bottom of the 1040 tax form your folks fill out. The EFC formula will ask for nothing if their reported income is very low and up to 25% or more if the reported income is over $100,000. As your parents report more income your EFC will increase.

2. Your parent’s non-retirement assets. The EFC formula will total all of the parents’ reported assets, including bank accounts, stocks, bonds, and real estate equity (usually not the house you live in). You’ll be asked to contribute about 5.6% of that total for college.

3. Your total income from all sources. Typically, student income will not affect the EFC until it reaches $3,000. After that threshold is met and certain other allowances are considered, the EFC formula will expect that about 50% of every dollar of income will be added to the family’s EFC. For independent students the figure is even higher.

4. The student’s assets. Here, the EFC formula runs amok and goes after reported student assets at a rate of up to 25%. Again, it is even worse for independent students.

How the financial aid formula works

Now that we’ve covered how the EFC works, let’s take a look at how the EFC fits into the larger financial aid picture:

First, the actual cost of college needs to be known. If you want to find out what college costs, ask the college, “What is your cost of attendance (COA) or student budget?” This is usually much larger than the tuition, which does not include room and board and a host of other charges. For the sake of illustration, let’s list three generic Costs of Attendance:

Let’s now assume a student has completed a FAFSA and his Expected Family Contribution was $10,000. Let’s also assume the student was accepted to a state university, a private college and an elite college. This is what the next step in the financial aid process would look like:

Note: the EFC remains the same regardless of what the college costs!

Understanding the financial aid award

Along with an acceptance letter a college will provide a newly-admitted student with an estimated financial aid award. The award offer should contain the total cost of a year’s attendance at college (COA) or Student Budget.

Let’s say, for example, the COA is $42,000.

Next, the college should provide you with a statement of what the expected family contribution amount should be. Often this is broken out into “Contribution from the student” and “Contribution for the Parent(s).” It might look like this:

They will then subtract the EFC from the cost of college to determine eligibility for aid:

If this student has applied for loans, been awarded grants, or even won some scholarships, the award may look something like this:

Now this is an example of an ideal award. In this scenario the student has managed to balance self-help aid (through a work/study program), free money (such as awards, grants, and scholarships), and federal aid (Stafford Loans, Perkins Loan). Most importantly, this financial aid scenario meets the entire need.

But do most colleges always provide such exemplary financial aid awards? No. As a matter of fact, when you are confronted with an inadequate award you don’t have to accept it—you can actually negotiate a better financial aid offer by using some of the compelling points below.

•Explain why you love that particular college - Be specific. Explain what the college offers that makes it such a great fit with the needs of your student. We all want to feel loved. Your case is always much stronger if the administrator hears how much the student wants to attend.

•Explain why you can’t pay the suggested amount - Again, be specific here. And don’t fudge the truth. Administrators can detect sincerity right away, so it pays to be honest here.

•Mention any special conditions that affect your capacity to pay for college – For example, if the student worked before starting college but understandably cannot work while in college, then you can report a “loss of income.” Similarly, if a parent’s earned income will be less in than what was reported for the prior year, you can report a “loss of income” here as well. Under such special conditions, once the student is admitted, contact the financial aid office and explain that the income earned in the prior year is largely irrelevant, since it will no longer represent a realistic standard on which to base for your ability to pay for college.

The financial aid process can be a complicated ordeal, but by educating yourself to understand the true cost of admission you will be better prepared to plan accordingly and avoid excessive student debt. Make sure to keep these tips in mind when reviewing your own financial aid packet—you worked this hard to get admitted, don’t let the dollar signs keep you down!

Have a question about your student’s financial aid packet? Leave it in a comment below for college expert and Getting In! co-author Steve Cohen to shed some insight.

So your exam is in a week and you procrastinated to the last-minute. You’ve got paper deadlines, minimal study time, and a brain that’s so dead from last night’s hangout session you can’t possibly remember anything, right? Wrong! Well, kinda wrong. This post is not a how-to on passing your final with flying colors, but you know, pass enough to not totally ruin your GPA.

Read the Chegg Student Blogger Team’s tips on surviving the most common types of finals>>

Today’s guest post is by college guru and Getting In! co-author Steve Cohen. For expert information on college admissions, financial aid, and more, order your copy of Getting In! today.

It’s decision time in the college admissions world. Students are hearing from their dream schools and their safeties. Some hear via e-mail while others open mailboxes to find thick or thin envelopes. Some students will be thrilled; others still in limbo as they deal with rejections and, more problematically, the wait-list.

So what do you do now?

If You’ve Been Accepted

•Avoid Sticker Shock – College is expensive; you already know that. Private college will cost more than $200,000 over the next four years. And public universities will cost about $80,000. Happily, those are “list” prices. The actual price you pay should be somewhat less – even if you are in a middle-class family earning $150,000 a year.

If you applied for financial aid, you should have received a financial aid award package along with the congratulatory admission letter. Compare the offers from each school that you were admitted to. See how much of each package is comprised of grants (scholarships); loans – subsidized and unsubsidized; and work study. The difference between what the college will provide and how much you actually have to lay out for tuition, room, board, books, and general living expenses is what is called the expected family contribution (EFC). This is your real cost.

Whether you meet that EFC depends on your family’s financial situation, but know two things:

1. There is money available – in the form of loans – to help you meet that expected family contribution; and

2. College financial aid officers have considerable leeway to adjust the package they award you.

Pick up the phone and call the college’s financial aid office. Find a human being and make that person your newest best friend. They have the discretion to exercise “professional judgment.”

•Send in a deposit – Don’t forget to send in a deposit by the common deadline of May 1. And make sure you send in a deposit to only one school. Colleges have been known to withdraw acceptances if families try to game the system by sending in deposits to more than one school. You can negotiate right up until that deadline with various schools’ financial aid offices. But you have to make a decision by the deadline date. If you hesitate too long and miss the deadline, you seriously risk losing that guaranteed spot of admission.

If You’ve Been Wait-Listed

Many schools actually factor the waitlist into their admission strategy. They know they won’t completely fill their class from the early and regular admit pools. Being off on their yield projection (the percentage of admitted kids who actually choose to enroll at that particular college) by just 1% could mean taking 30 kids off the waitlist for an entering class of 1000. So if you end up on a waitlist (or two,) and want to get off the waitlist and onto the admit list, plan on being proactive.

•How to get noticed – Let the college know you really want to attend that particular school. E-mail them, call them, and have your high school’s guidance counselor contact them. Some colleges give you a very short deadline to decide whether you want to be considered to come off the waitlist. If they give you a 24 or 48 hour window to decide, realize that if you don’t take them up on it, the offer will go to the next kid on the waitlist. Decide quickly.

If You Didn’t Get in Anywhere

There are always options. A surprising number of schools look for applicants at the last minute. And some are pretty good colleges that find themselves looking for kids after the May 1st deposit deadline. They were simply off by a few percentage points in their yield projections. Although these schools didn’t make your initial application list, you should give them a fresh look. At the very least they can be places where you can prove yourself academically for a year and then transfer.

•Make the guidance counselor your best friend – Often times when a student doesn’t get into the college of their choice the family takes it out on the high school guidance counselor. That is misplaced anger. The guidance counselor wasn’t in the admission committee room as they discussed the college’s particular institutional needs that particular year. And in most cases, the guidance counselor feels as bad as you do. But occasionally, the guidance counselor suggested a bit more realism about your college choices. And parents – more often than kids — just didn’t want to hear.

So if you’ve been waitlisted or need to find a school, the guidance counselor will be your best resource. They have credibility and access that you don’t, and who knows, they might be able to get you off that list and into a college!

Have a question about your student’s acceptance letter? Leave it in a comment below and college expert Steve Cohen will give some insight.

This feature was originally published by Forbes; click here to read the article in its entirety.